ebay idiots

In article <e1d20d630901151744r7a086540sd4ec7af166392aaf at mail.gmail.com>, "William Donzelli" <wdonzelli at gmail.com> writes: All true. When I emailed him, I introduced myself as a collector of serial terminals. On ebay I have written guides for collecting serial terminals. I think I also edited my personal profile there to say that I am a collector of serial terminals. When you browse my buying feedback, you'll see that pretty much all I buy are terminals :-). In this particular case, I told the guy that when he gets tired of trying to sell this particular terminal for a high price to contact me about selling me just the boards and then scrapping the tube and enclosure. (The 2647A has BASIC in ROM, so having the boards is not an unreasonable proposition; I could put the boards into a 264x enclosure that I already have with a reasonable tube and get an "upgrade". All the 264x terminals are essentially interchangeable as far as the power supply, tube and enclosure are concerned; what's different are the board sets and possibly slight variations on the keyboard. For this particular item, the guy doesn't have the keyboard either, and they are custom made for this particular terminal with a funky connector that's not standard either.) Yep, that's understood. But its ebay. I expect a little haggling as part of the transaction. Of course, ebay has set up the haggling to pretty much work in one direction only: increasing prices. There was one of these 2648As for sale by a surplus dealer based out of Boise. He listed it twice, the second time reducing the price. It was still a little pricey for me. After it didn't sell the second time, I contacted him privately and said "hey, I'll drive up to Boise and pick it up from you on a Saturday for $XX cash." (He had regular business hours on Saturday, so this was not me asking him to open up just for me.) I don't know what he had planned on doing with it after listing it twice and having it fail, but I drove up there and met him in person and put the cash in his palms and took home a nice 2648A. He was a reasonable guy about it. I understand the "surplus dealer" pricing mentality. There's that guy we've talked about before (he keeps changing his ebay handle recently, so I don't know what he's going by now) that is located in upstate NY. You can always tell his listings because they always include the same boiler plate text "This item will look good in your vintage computer collection.". Now that guy does have some rare stuff and he does move items at his price point, so from a business perspective he's not an idiot. However, the Visual Technology terminal that I bought from him was so poorly packaged for shipment that it arrived as a smashed pile of plastic. That tells me that he is still an idiot, particularly since he is obviously trying to appeal to collectors. Nobody collects smashed and damaged goods. Based on that experience, I won't be buying from him again, no matter how rare it is, nor will I recommend him to anyone else and in fact, just the opposite, I will caution people in buying from him. Since I'm a vocal member of the community he's trying to market his goods towards, that's just plain stupid. Again, its the idiocy. There seems to be a recent trend on ebay for places that collect electronics for recycling to have someone who picks out the "old" items for sale on ebay. I don't begrudge them wanting to make a buck off something collectible, but they seem to have nothing but dollar signs in their heads when it comes to pricing. $800 for an HP2621A *without* the keyboard, and the keyboard listed separately for another $200? I watch these items that have "buy it now or best offer" and make a best offer each time the listing expires. They, of course, refuse my best offer because they want an order of magnitude more than what these items have sold for in the past (I save off completed listings to build a price history). But hey, maybe eventually a sucker will come in and buy it, or maybe they'll eventually realize that they're charging more than the market will bear. Serial terminals are a bit odd in that they are not irreplaceable one-of-a-kind units. You can easily replace them with a commodity PC and a serial port running a terminal emulation program. When serial terminals break down in a working vintage computer setup, they don't need to spend $800 on a vintage replacement when $20 from the local used computer store will do the job. Sometimes its different with Tektronix graphics terminals, though, because they *do* have a specialized function and at least for the raster based terminals, there isn't a readily available terminal emulation program for a PC. (The 401x series is such a standard protocol that it *is* readily emulatable by almost any terminal emulator program.) I've bought many terminals from surplus dealers on ebay, most of the time I'm the only bidder. There's a few dealers that have been a joy to buy clueless and those are the ones I would say are idiots. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>