Outbid

Well I was the person who outbid you. By the way its an 11/73, I don't think the person who is selling it really knows the configuation. If I recall correctly, I was the first person to bid on it when it first appeared on eBay. There were several reasons why I was interested in it: 1) Its in the same country that I'm in, and reasonably close, so I save a lot on shipping and customs. Not all of us who bid on eBay have "deep pockets", so when I see a system where I can save more than $100 in shipping and customs I bid more aggresively. All the complete systems I've bought on eBay have been located in Canada for just that reason. 2) I use these systems to host vintage graphics displays. I have an E&S PS390 arriving this week, and I need a host for it. I don't intend to leave it in a corner as part of a "collection", I intend to have it up and running. 3) Cheap systems are hard to come by in this neck of the woods. There were not a large number of PDP11s shipped to Edmonton to start with, and many of them ended up in process control systems. Unfortunately, these machines were typically scrapped when the system was upgraded. I have contacts within a number of the companies where they are still used, and I hope those systems will eventually come my way. But, I don't know when, and I can't be sure. About a month ago I was offered two PDP11/44 systems, but I was called a few hours before going to pick them up, the deal was off. It turned out that the company found another use for them, but they promised I'd get them when they were finished with them. Basically, eBay is still cheaper than going to resellers to get stuff. For those of us who want working systems and aren't in Silicon Valley or on the East Coast, there aren't too many other choices. -- Dr. Mark Green mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca Professor (780) 492-4584 Director, Research Institute for Multimedia Systems (RIMS) Department of Computing Science (780) 492-1071 (FAX) University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada