https://www.acrosups.top/vintage-computing-c-29/
Don't pay attention to where it says Old Price.
Click on the item and see the discounted price.
Free shipping over $15.
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Cindy Croxton
Electronics Plus
1613 Water Street
Kerrville, TX 78028
830-370-3239 cell
sales at elecplus.com
AOL IM elcpls
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Actually, for me, this could probably be expanded to "early 90s SCSI HDD
edition".
As a collector of early 90s Sun systems, I have many Seagate ST1480N
(aka Sun 424 drives). Starting two year ago, they all started dying. Out
of a dozen, I am now down to one working one. Is anyone repairing/saving
these or should I just throw them out when they fail?
alan
> From: Ali
> There is a guy with a listing with missing parts which he is
> advertising as working. It has been listed for over two years now ...
> I offered to buy a part off of it for ~half of what he wanted
> for everything and he replied that "the value was in keeping it all together".
Well, since he's not an expert (which we can deduce from his calling it 'working'
when it's missing bits), perhaps he feared you were trying to grab the 'good bit',
and leave him with un-salable dreck.
Although given the amount you were willing to pay, maybe he is not thinking hard!
Noel
> From: Alan Perry
> They went unsold again and I waited for the next auction run. I offered
> the split-the-difference price again and they countered even higher. I
> got the message and have stopped bidding. That was a couple months ago
> and they still have sold any of those systems.
Eventually they may wise up. I had a guy selling a group of 4 DEC drives,
asking for somewhat over the going rate. I pointed the guy at a prior 'open
bidding' sale for one, demonstrating the 'fair market value', and offered him
4 times that, plus shipping. He comes back with a much higher number. So I
waited a year, they were still there, now he was more willing to be reasonable.
So I suggest waiting for a couple more months and write him a 'I see it's
been X months, my offer of Y is still open' note.
Noel
> From: Rob Jarratt
> I got this:
> ...
> For security, please keep all communication through the eBay message
> system.
Well, that bit sounds positive.
And the feedback sounds good, but 56 items is a bit low - I've heard of scams
where people do a number of small items to build up a feedback, then 'cash
in'.
Overall - I dunno. I'd try asking eBay - 'I've gotten a slightly odd
second-chance offer from this person. Is this legit?'.
Noel
Gentlepeople,
I have a Philips logic analyzer (PM3585) which is about 20 years old at this point. It seems to be basically functional except for the keyboard, which unfortunately is a critical part.
This is one of those molded rubber type, with a circuit board behind the rubber that has contact areas made of carbon film (at least they are black in color) and on the back of each key a small cylindrical bump also coated with carbon. Some of the buttons work but most don't seem to even if I press hard.
I've disassembled the keyboard, which was easy enough. Inspection shows no damage and no signs of corrosion or contamination. I wiped everything with isopropyl alcohol anyway. The result is no change in behavior.
Any suggestions for what to do next?
paul
> From: Fred Cisin
> Adding additional OR'ed terms (eBay does OR with comma delimited list
> in parentheses) sometimes results in FEWER hits, when that SHOULD
> always give more hits
A similar one is that adding more terms (i.e. AND) sometimes turns up things
that didn't turn up before. I guess this 'PDP-11 parts' failure is an example
of that.
> The change of category is reprehensible.
Yeah, it was pretty irritating - I just happened to notice it by chance,
and then for a long time had to manually re-search. It seems to have gone
away (at least on 'pdp-11') in the last few days, though?
Oh, and the corollary (which people with brains faster than mine probably
already realized :-): if you list something (epecially expensive!), wait a
bit and do a search on the obvious terms that people are likely to use - if
it doesn't turn up, cancel and try again (maybe with a slightly different
title).
Noel
> From: Ali
> the real winning price. Basically on second chance he is offering you
> your highest bid price (the one that lost out to the original bad
> bidder). What it should really be is if that guy didn't exist what
> would have been the winning bid?
Good point. That _is_ a bad sign. The seller might not have thought it
through (they do after all only have a feedback of 50, so they don't have
that much experience), and maybe they just made a mistake. But it might be a
scammer/shill who used a high shill bid to find out your top.
(And maybe the 'only use eBait comms' thing was just a double bank shot to
take in people like me...'he says that so he must be honest').
Noel
> From: js
> I've seen similar behavior before, and other search problems. At one
> point in time, eBay's search engine worked just fine. Then, a number of
> years ago, they revised their - supposedly making it 'smarter' - and
> ever since then, it hasn't worked as well
That's troubling. I wonder if there are any heuristics one/we can apply to
work around this failure? We can't really add a zillion different words
('parts', etc) to searches in an attempt to work around this bug.
I'd previously noticed that searches for 'pdp-11' turned up things with
'pdp11' in the title, so they apparently internally drop the '-'. (Google
does a similar thing.) I just tried, and searching for '"pdp-11"' (i.e. exact
multi-word match, which I use for '"Digital Equipment"') still turns up
'pdp11' items. Case ('PDP-11' versus 'pdp-11') doesn't seem to matter
either.
On a whim, I tried searching for '"pdp-11" "pdp-11"' (i.e. just repeated the
keyword), and this time it _did_ turn it up! Very odd. I wonder why that made
a difference? Well, I guess I'll just have to add that to my list of searches.
Until the next one...
Interestingly, this does blow up one theory that I had about what caused the
failure. I had assumed they have lots of threaded lists, with e.g. all 'foo'
items on a list from a 'foo' header, and when given a search for 'foo bar'
they'd just go to the 'foo' list and run down it looking for items with
'bar'. So my theory was that there'd been an error, and the item in question
never made it onto the 'pdp11' list; the 'pdp-11 parts' search found it via
the 'parts' list.
But I have no potential explanation at all how '"pdp-11" "pdp-11"' found it!
FWIW, 'pdp11 pdp11' worked too. Bizarre.
Noel
> From: js
> To take a suggestion from your playbook, I'd try asking eBay - 'I'm
> getting incorrect search results. Why?'
Yeah, that would be something to try, but I was wary of stirring up trouble -
eBay might decide to void the sale, etc. Maybe I should.
My message to this list was as much a warning, as it was a query if anyone
had any idea why this was happening, or if they'd seen similar behaviour
before.
Noel
