The cost of "free" stuff

At 11:17 AM 12/4/01, Ben Franchuk wrote: No, it doesn't. It boils down to whether or not you want something. Clearly the only truly "free" thing is when you happen to drive by someone's house for some other reason, and they hand you something you didn't expect. You were going to their house anyway, and so the costs associated with driving there were already budgeted. I have lots of excess VAX stuff because I tend to buy it on occasion from scrappers and government types who are throwing it away. That leaves me with extras of course and I've pretty much saturated the folks in the Bay Area who are willing to come get stuff. So now I have two options: The "free" option is I put it on the sidewalk on a certain day and the City of Sunnyvale comes by with a big truck and takes it away. This has the benefit that it requires little work on my part, it has the downside that another piece of nearly classic hardware has ended its life permanently. A slightly less "free" option is that I can give it to a scrapper who will try to auction it off and then if that fails will recycle it. This has the benefit that there is a small chance I might get some of the money I invested back. The even less "free" option is that I offer it here for the cost of shipping. Now I spend the time and effort to, find or buy a box to pack it in, then drive down to a package delivery service and send it on its way. For things that fit in a Priority mail box this works well (Q-bus boards for example) because the post office gives you boxes and generally I've got enough left over packing material that its straight forward to do. Plus the mailman will pick the box up from my house if I choose. The even more expensive option (to me) is to try to give something "big" away (A MicroVAX II in a BA123 certainly fits that category!). Now I have to buy a special box and/or pallet. That's usually about $8 - $15. Then the foam (peanuts don't work on really heavy things) which can run $5 - $15 depending. And spend the time packing it and take it to the UPS counter, wait in line, and ship it. All told about 2 - 4 hours of my time. Lately, given how busy I've been, it has been really hard to find the time to do that sort of stuff. So the final option is to simply take the item to a pack and ship place that is < 10 minutes away. Fill out their UPS shipment form, leave them my credit card information, and then go home again. My time is < 1 hr. But then I have no visibility into how much it will cost (I do know these guys well and it is fairly economical) but its 10% - 20% more than if I spent the time to pack it and take it to UPS. However, for some things, say a PDP-8, I seriously doubt that anyone on this list would refuse to pay the cost to pack and ship it to them by a third party. For common things, like a MicroVAX II the value proposition is not so clear. Except that "used terminals" from dealers typically cost around $100 US. By the same token, they are exceptionally easy to find for the moment so if you invested in a couple of tanks of gas you could probably find one within 1 days drive for "free". But now you would have to invest your time and effort to call folks, drive around, and pick it up and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. Over the last two years I've ended up buying over 15 VT320's, out of those 15 I've kept 6 really nice examples (bright, non-burned, screens, two GREEN ones!). They probably cost me $150 total in terms of cash but maybe a weeks worth (40 hrs) of time over those two years. So the bottom line is, if you want a Link MC70 terminal w/Manual [I paid $20 for the manual from one of those dealers], which people sell on the web for US$400 for the cost that I paid to have it packed and shipped to you, _whatever_ that happens to be. (I realize that you have to trust that I would try to rip you off by telling you it cost more than it did, I'd be happy to include for you the invoice from the pack and ship place) Then let me know. I'll include the manual. However, another thing this reminded me off. It has, displayed some initial temperature instability. This came in the form of the 'yellow' changing a bit now and then. Since only one character changed it appeared to be one of the RAMs and not the tube or crt electronics. After it was warmed up this symptom went away. --Chuck