I find generally I haven't paid too much for the gear I've got.
However, it's not the initial payment, it's the shipping (huge when your
talking about New Zealand from anywhere), and then the bits and pieces you
might have to buy to repair/restore the said item. These two incidentals
often cost more than the computer itself!
Terry (Tez)
On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 10:29 AM, Shaun Halstead <shaunhalstead at gmail.com>
wrote:
On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 3:08 PM, Al Kossow <aek at
bitsavers.org> wrote:
$15,000 for a used Mekel microfiche scanner in
the early-2000's
I have a Mekel M565 and an M525, with the greyscale interface card,
sitting in my office. They were a parting gift from my boss when we closed
the old company down. They get periodic use, though the scan element on
the 565 has seen better days.
It turned out to be just past prototype stage, was missing the pneumatic
fiche handler
and never really got it working at production volumes. The small number
of
fiche scans
on bitsavers from around then was the sum total of the output.
I never found the pneumatic loader to be reliable enough to be useful.
Even when we were running our 565 eight hours a day, we hand loaded
everything.
The most I, personally, have spent on computer gear was probably the $25
I gave for my microVAX-II back in 1999 or 2000. That was the same auction
where I bought a pallet of HP work stations for $25.
--Shaun, k0per