17 Jul
2005
17 Jul
'05
1:31 p.m.
At 11:33 PM 7/16/05 -0500, James wrote:
Joe R. wrote:
That's definitely a problem. I used to have six good sources in this
area and now I'm down to two. The only good part of that is that one of
them is picking up a lot of the business from two of the former ones and I
have this one "trained" to watch out for the kind of stuff that I'm
interested in so I'm a LOT of good stuff from him lately. I'm not having to
do nearly as much running around and I'm not having to deal with some of
the other loonies.
That's one of the parts that I most enjoy.
It's like a treasure hunt to
me and I enjoy the trill of discovery. That's why I have little respect for
people that want to do nothing but sit at their desk and buy off of E-bay.
And I have NO patience when they start whining and complaining about E-bay
prices! If they don't like E-bay prices then get out and find their own
stuff! There's plenty of it available. For example, Friday I picked up
TEN FH 8" Shugart floppy drives in minty condition AND a HP 9835A AND a
Diablo RK-05 compatible disk drive. Cost = $0.00
Joe
I enjoy getting out and scrounging as much as the next person.
Unfortunately, I work 60-80 hours a week which cuts into time for
treasure hunting therefore ebay has to be my primary source a lot of the
time. I do frequent the LowEndMac swap list, check out surplus places
in the DFW area when I'm out of service calls and network with some
other collectors who share my specific interests too. I've been known
to drive to Austin on a Saturday just to check out Goodwill there. My
biggest bitch is that electronics surplus stores seem to be dying out. As new equipment gets cheaper and cheaper, less seems
to be ending up in
store and more at the recycler's dump.
You just have to find the recyclers! With the mountains of PCs out there
now every town has as at least one. They may setup to deal only with PCs
but they all get occasional S-100, HP and other worthwhile computers and
since they're not part of what they deal with they'll usually sell them CHEAP.
As an example, I really miss
Software Etc in Allen. As a Mac collector, it was my
second home. They
survived on resale of older PeeCee stuff. As new equipment got cheaper,
the profit from older stufff grew slimmer. Finally they closed the store.
Yeah there was a trift store in the area that used to be THE place for
people dropping off computers. I got a lot of good deals there but they got
out of the computer business :-(
Joe
--
www.blackcube.org The Texas State Home for Wayward and Orphaned Computers