classics I threw away or sold ... foolishly

On Wed, May 18, 2016, Swift Griggs wrote: I guess I don't have too much to regret yet. The things I regret getting rid of: 1. My family's first Commodore PET 8032, back in 1988 or so. Strangely I miss the books more than the system, though, perhaps because I have another system like it now. It was great to see one of the books I missed most from that set a few years ago at a friend's house; I gave him $5 for it. It was available on Bombjack, but I had no idea what it was called or how to find it. Anyway, the 8032 thrown on the curb was working except for some keyboard keys, and had a nice LQ daisywheel printer and an 8050 dual floppy drive. Both worked AFAIK, except that one time I apparently sent a control code to the printer that switched it to real ASCII, and I could never get it back to PETSCII even with a power cycle. My new 8032 worked perfectly, including the keys, in the late 1990s when I got it, but has stopped powering on now. 2. My NES and SNES with a fairly good number of games, plus a Super Advantage. I don't know what specific revisions the consoles were, but they didn't look like the later redesigns. I reasoned that emulating games was not only good enough but better, because I could pause, rewind, and fast-forward them. 3. My first Intel PC, a GHC EasyData 486SX/25. If I had known EasyData was so uncommon I probably would have kept it. It was no speed demon, even after I put the OverDrive and 24 MB (I think it was) in it, but it was a big step up from 8-bits. 4. Various systems I got to see only a few times at my dad's work, when they liquidated the company a few years after he died. I was interested in the Sun workstations and to a lesser extent the Harris mini (not sure what kind). But I would have been even less equipped to deal with them (especially the big metal) than I am now. -- Eric Christopherson