15 Jun
2009
15 Jun
'09
3:59 p.m.
From: Josh Dersch
Sent: Saturday, June 13, 2009 9:51 PM
I love thrift stores :).
[snip]
For those of you in the Seattle area, RE-PC (in both
Seattle and
Tukwila) are fun to browse from time to time, and they generally hold
onto "vintage" computer stuff rather than just scrapping it. Since I
started browsing their stores about two years ago, I've picked up a
number of cool old machines (nothing too rare, but a lot of good 8-bit
stuff, old dumb terminals, and a few things useful on my larger machines
like 9-track drives.)
If you're in the area, drop by and you might find
something...
The Seattle store is about 6 blocks from the PDPplanet collection. We've
used them as a resource over the years for things like KVMs, odd cables,
etc.
However, the last time I was over there (about 6 weeks ago), all of the
interesting stuff was gone, and there was only old PC ordure on the tables.
It used to be that you could find interesting Macs for sale, but there was
nary a one in the store.
My favorite find, though, was at Boeing surplus just
before they shut
down -- found a working HP-67 calculator w/AC adapter for $5. I don't
usually get that lucky :). The card reader even works after all these
years...
I wish I'd had the room in my car for, and the guts to explain to my wife
about, the HP 9000/8xx server (roughly an 870, but one of the later models
with an <alpha><digit><digit> designation) that had disks, Ethernet,
tape
drives, etc. etc. usw. ktl., for only $75. A $50K+ machine (as I know from
spec'ing them for Cisco in another life) for $75.
Damn.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
(206) 342-2239
(206) 465-2916 cell
http://www.pdpplanet.org/