15 Mar
2007
15 Mar
'07
5:26 p.m.
Josef Chessor wrote:
from them, including a $10 Apple IIe with SCSI,
RAMWorks, RAMFactor,
and Transwarp IIe!) But sadly, those days are gone.
Nice!
And with the VCM
and eBay both too expensive for me, I guess I'm stuck out. :(
You can occasionally find a good deal as long as what you're looking for
isn't to rare, or you get lucky. I got an SGI o2 with a 270Mhz R12k CPU for
$250 on eBay when they were selling there for $1000. I timed watched for a
couple months, and grabbed a "Buy It Now" when it came up. Last year I was
able to set aside a little money for a *long* overdue upgrade to my main VMS
system, it took 6 months of waiting, but I was able to finally get one at
what I was willing to pay, in fact I timed it just right and got 2 for what
I'd expected to pay for 1.
Another example would be books, I wanted a pair of books, and it took me 2+
years of waiting to get a pair that I could afford. Of course then they
stank of Cigarette smoke so bad that I couldn't stand to be around them. :^(
Other books that I've waited months or years, for an affordable copy to show
up on eBay have turned out a lot better.
I also miss the interesting people you'd meet
there going on. From
run-of-the-mill crazy people to actual geeks that worked on some of
the vintage stuff and knew more about it than I ever will. It was a
bona fide club...
We had the CP/M User Group swap meet a couple times a year here. Then from
what I understand at the last one someone caused some problems (sold a
sabotagued power brick), and they stopped doing them. This was probably 2-3
years ago. Now there is nothing really like it left around here.
One thing I don't like about this area is a decided lack of swap meets
or even flea markets.
Now days everyone seems to simply dump stuff at Goodwill.
On an interesting note, Goodwill now has a "Upscale Boutique" in Downtown
Portland. We've not checked it out yet, as we rarely get into Portland, but
I'm told it's very high end.
Zane