28 Jan
1998
28 Jan
'98
4:23 a.m.
No old computer is ever "dead". One
shouldn't hold onto them only if they
work. The point is to keep them around so that one can at least see and
touch them, open them up and look at their circuitry. You can't do that
with a picture obviously. All computers will eventually "die", but I'm
not about to start burying them all. After all, they don't start
decomposing and smelling bad. If you don't want to keep it, e-mail me
privately and I'll pay to have it shipped to me and I'll hold onto it.
Sorry. :) I don't mean to say that I would dump it - simply that as I
cannot repair it myself, is it worth paying for someone to do that or
would I be better off just keeping it as a record, and looking at the
manuals as the main part of the deal (for now). Mostly I like to display
my computers as working systems (although I ran out of floorspace months
ago), and so prefer working models to broken ones. :) I figure that it is
better to have a computer working than broken, so long as I can afford to
get it fixed - but I refuse to trash any of my systems, no matter what
the problem. And this goes triple for anything that I only have one of
anyway!
I got very angry at a local dealer recently, for he trashed some 30
microbees 2 weeks before I got there. I had been searching for a
Microbee for about 6 months, and he was supposed to sell second-hand
8-bit systems as his business. He said he never liked Microbees anyway.
:( I finally got one, but if I could have saved those others I would
have been able to offer them (for shipping) to the list. Microbees, for
those who haven't heard of them, are neat little cp/m systems that were
designed and built in Australia - not many computers were made here,
although there were a few, but the Microbee would be one of the two most
significant locally made computers.
Adam.