ebay: Antique UNICAC computer memory planes

Marvin <marvin(a)rain.org> wrote: ] More interesting stuff from ebay. ] http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=43065424 Beware; in the past this guy has offerred "core memory planes" for sale several times, even on this list. But if you had read the fine print you would have found that there were no cores - just the rectangular PC-board "frame" in which the cores used to reside. I suppose you could call that a plane, but it isn't what most compu-geeks would think when hearing the word in that context. In this case, he includes some text from an "actual" customer ranting about how cool his core memory board is, describing at length the 1024 core bits and yada yada yada, but if you read the all the way to the end you'll find that what he's actually offerring are the controller cards - not the 1K bit planes that he describes in such detail. Classic bait-and-switch. In fact, even when he was earlier selling the core memory boards, they didn't have the cores, so this rant is obviously marketing delirium. Nothing that is an outright lie, but misleading as Hell, unless somebody actually things a PC board frame with no components is awesomely cool and "looks great under a microscope". Tell me that isn't engineered to fool people into thinking they're getting real core memory. Sheesh! And "whatever was last written (back in the 50s) on the planes I bought is still there" - nope, not "there" as in "on the planes I bought", but "there" as in "wherever those cores happen to be now". As far as I'm concerned, this guy is a rip-off artist. If he was simply selling Univac memory controller boards, I'd be more than half interested. And oddly enough, as near as I can tell, these controller boards actually *do* have some core bits left on them. (Are "windings" the same as cores, or is this another aspect of his marketing ingenuity?) So in that sense they may be more interesting than his former offerings. Anyway, seeing how far he'll go to be misleading, I don't trust him. I get the feeling that if I read enough fine print, I'd find that he's actually just selling pictures of those things, or pictures of something else that had once been in the same room with those things, or... It's really a shame that something like a Univac memory unit would end up in the hands of somebody like this, who would hack it to bits and then try to sell the broken fragments by being so misleading. Sadly, Bill. PS. I suppose it is possible that he once sold an actual core plane with cores in it, and that's what this testimonial is describing. But the first time I saw that ad of his, I rushed over to his web page and found him offerring "coreless" memory planes. And even then he was ranting and raving about how cool cores were, in the same way he does here, only mentioning at the end that these boards don't actually have any core. So again, there might not be any outright lies in any of this, but be sure to read *ALL* of the fine print before you consider dealing with this guy.