Hello, new member here.
Sometimes the electronics gods smile upon us!
About a year ago, the community college here gave me several large boxes of stuff that was donated but they were going to throw out. There was easily a couple hundred pounds of it. It was mostly circuit boards with through-hole components (including loads of socketed logic ICs), which I am just now beginning to salvage parts from.
A couple other boxes from the lot were like you describe, HiTech. Stud mount diodes, massive cables, ceramic capacitors, big resistors, TO-220 heatsinks, 3-phase rectifiers, a couple power supplies, and more molex headers and various connectors than anyone wants to think about. There were also some miniscule phototransistors that mount through a single hole, connected by separate top and bottom pads. Useless but neat items included a 60-Amp, 700-Volt fuse!
After being interested in electronics since I was a little kid, I'm just now getting serious about it. It's nice to have all these components to experiment with.