Pdp8 on ebay

How does that make it any less a real auction? This seems to amount to defining "real auction" as "anything before ebay". Auctions have been evolving for as long as they've existed; I see no justification for drawing a line before ebay and decreeing that everything before it is really an auction but ebay itself isn't. A silent auction is very different from a..."non-silent", I guess, auction; why not decry silent auctions as non-real? (Indeed, it would surprise me if that didn't happen when they were first introduced.) Similar remarks apply to pretty much any auction variant. The Wikipedia page "Auction" is informative - and, relevantly to the discussino, says that "during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries", a form of auction that ended abruptly and only semi-predictably was used to "ensure that no one could know exactly when the auction would end and make a last-second bid". There are also a whole bunch of other types; either someone has been getting very creative on that Wikipedia page or making ebay out as a new thing, or not a "real" auction, is pretty much groundless. Not that I'm an ebay apologist. I think they're evil and the world would be better off without them - but this has nothing to do with how fair it is, or isn't, to use the word "auction" for what they do. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B