----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 09, 2010 1:59 PM
Subject: Re: Selling Calcomp 565 plotter
A year or so
ago there was all kinds of cheap/free stuff from people
losing their homes and not having anywhere to take their collections (in
FL but happens all over now). Sad to see actually.
Horribly sad to see. I'm in the thick of it, my house is currently the
only one on my street that isn't bank-owned, and never heard about ANY
collectibles needing homes. Where did you see this stuff?
Different forums I read before heading to bed. The problem with those deals
is finding somebody local to pick items up since the owners are in a big
hurry to get out and can't be shipping things all over (or they would have
gone to ebay to begin with). A few years back I got a free loaded A3000
(just paid a local friend to ship it) when a guy had to relocate for work
ASAP and since few people lived in that area of AZ ended up junking a garage
full of vintage gear. My friend made out with a few old Apple items like the
original portable. I would have been in heaven if I was close enough to
drive a truck there. We had something like a weeks notice from the time he
posted the stuff on a forum to grab what we could before it all hit the
dumpster. I don't have the emails handy for the item list, but quite a few
things worth some money ended up in a landfill.
Another goldmine is the kid who gets tons of vintage gear from who knows
where and their parents make them get rid of it all after the house gets
overrun. I see that happen way too often in the mac croud.
Yea, anything pre 1980's seems to be rare
anywhere these days.
Not in .EU, apparently.
I don't know about that, they seem to have major laws about selling untested
old electronics there, and seem to have a passion for crunching any circuit
board with lead solder on sight. All their vintage gear is going to the
trash heap with 10 foot (sorry 3 meter) fences with guards to keep people
from rummaging.
Even newer
stuff is rare in some areas. I tripped over a DEC
MicroVAX last week at a recycler, which is rare in my area. If you want
older stuff you need to be in larger cities where the stuff was
purchased new and used. I bet anything ever made can be found in the NYC
area, of course there are millions of other would be collectors looking
there too.
I hope you rescued that MicroVAX.
Yea I got it, 3100-85. Will play around with it a bit and probably pass it
on to a DEC collector from this list. Anybody have a spare DEC serial cable
with those MJJ plugs?
There are some biggish cities around here, though
nothing like NYC of
course. Tampa is nontrivial. Zero classic hardware there though. Lots
of cool stuff (lots of modern IBM mainframes in Tampa) but nothing old.
The recycler here sometimes get a semi load from places like Cleveland
(maybe Pittsburgh) to take apart. I think that is where the microvax came
from, same with a bunch of PS/2 machines last year. They are currently
crunching a bunch of rackmount computers and misc consumer grade computers.
I go every friday and dig around. I suggest you find a small time recycler
in the area and see what shows up.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL