Note on LISP Machines available

On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Christian R. Fandt wrote: Hi Christian. [ I copied this to the CC list for the edification of all who are involved with this. ] Good to hear from you again. Sorry for never following through on that LaserJet carthridge you wanted. I'm really bad at follow-up sometimes. If you still want that cart, I still have it! It's been in the same place ever since we last spoke about it. If you want it, send me your address again and I'll ship it off to you, my treat. Yep, I was one of the victims of her unreasonably high expectations. The entirety of the hardware she has is worth, in my opinion, less than $200. $100 would be reasonable for the lot. She only has one monitor/keyboard/mouse, and because these systems use custom display and keyboard interfaces you can't (easily) just take a standard monitor and keyboard and connect them. I tried to explain this to her but she said other people she contacted said they would just build interfaces. Whatever. For the complexity of doing this, please refer to old postings to the CC list from Tony Duell (do a search). Suffice it to say, it's not straightfoward. So in effect she has one complete system, a bunch of otherwise useless CPUs, and a pile of documentation and software for various different Xerox systems. 6085's are certainly rarer these days. I don't know if my own experience can be a reliable indicator because I'm a hyper-collector, but I have about 8-10 of these systems in my collection (with maybe 3 monitors and 2 keyboards). They are certainly uncommon--I won't say rare--but when they are found they are usually found in batches like this. The last time I got any was a pallet load I hauled from North Carolina back in the 1998 timeframe. In the meantime I have seen one or two here and there, but not often. Then again, I don't see anything with the regular frequency that I used to, so one could argue everything is rare these days, including C64s. I could be mistaken (probably am) but I could swear I remember seeing one at WeirdStuff in Sunnyvale recently. Anyway, they have a certain cachet because they are second generation STAR machines. They don't have the physicality of the original 8010, but they do run the same software, and for those who want to own a piece of early GUI history, this would be a good entry point. Keep in mind that these systems will still take a lot of work and reading to get up and running. Example: when they boot they expect to connect to a time server on the network. There are (easy) ways around this, but again it's not a system for the casual collector. You have to know what you're doing before you can get to a desktop login dialog. The real treasure here are the disks and manuals. I'd really like to get my hands on the 6060 system disks and manuals (I have a 6060 but no software or manuals) and the 8" floppies. I have the facilities to make copies for other people, BTW. So in general, the hardware is not interesting to me. To others it might be because they probably don't already have a pile of them :) But because she only has one keyboard, mouse and monitor (the latter of which from the sounds of it is pretty beat up) she only has one complete system. The rest is spare parts. The documentation and software is a different story. I would say it's worth a few hundred bucks (I don't want to be more specific because I don't want to bias the bargaining process), but it should be separated into logical lots. It makes no sense to include the 8" floppies with the 5.25" stuff, for example, because the 1186 doesn't have an 8" floppy drive. Ditto with the 6060 stuff. In conclusion, for someone who really wants an 1186 system, $500 would not be unreasonable for one complete system with software and manuals. Based on the description of the physical condition of the monitor, I'd knock that in half. I'd have to look at the spreadsheet in detail to guess at prices for the various software and docs. But unless she's willing to separate the lot then the deal is a non-starter. $2,500 is a pipe dream. I hope this helps. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]