OK, lightweights - I have done the cross county trip several times now, and a few from NY to TX, NY to TN, and countless trips from NY to IL. The most stressful was not far - NY to OH, but I had to do the round trip three times in six days, hauling crap. I have also done at least a few 500+ mile trips with less than a days notice. Which brings up the next cross country trip... Some of you folks know the deal. Every year I try to make a cross county trip in early May. In order to fund the trip, I haul large things for people. I have a van and a flatbed trailer, so I can take fairly large items like six foot minicomputers. Things that ride on the trailer are completely wrapped in a thick cacoon of plastic, tape and shrinkwrap, and is watertight. My trip starts in NY (Hudson Valley region) and takes me to both the Bay Area and LA. I can pick up or drop off just about anywhere along the way, and can even go a bit out of the way (last year was down to KY, I could even pick up in MA). There will be a definite stop in Boulder, CO. Prices? Cheap! Well, relatively cheap. Gas is going to really sting this year, so my rates may need to go up. Cheaper than the freight company, with "grey glove" service, anyway. Remember, I collect big computers as well, and bashed in parts due to shipping really bother me! This is a bit preliminary, but the time is right to start fishing for deliveries. I would leave NY sometime around mid-April, and return in mid-May. If interested, please contact me off list. William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org

On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, Teo Zenios wrote: Of course. But who woulda thunk that anybody would WANT those old Kurta calculators, Apple 1s, Lisa's, etc. Particularly when you could get a small trade-in for currrent stuff.

----- Original Message ----- From: "William Donzelli" <aw288 at osfn.org> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 9:29 PM Subject: Re: Common items you passed up that turned rare when you wanted them was Everybody probably has stories on passing up items that ended up being worth money on ebay later on. I was thinking more of things you ended up wanting for your own collection later on, but passed up when it was easy to find earlier. For instance 16MB 30 pin SIMMs were fairly cheap at some point but I never stocked up on them, now I have all these older Macs and add-on cards that can use them but they are hard to come by cheap.

After the Tektronix Auction in 1992 we had piles of Tek 22 & 32 calculators, 8001 development systems, 4051 & 4052 computers, 4010 terminals. In 1993 we got in about 10 Xerox 8010 Stars, an Alto, a Magnolia and a Lilith from Intel in Oregon, along with a truckload of intel development systems l, ll, lll and lV and associated drives, prom burners, emulators and paper tape stuff. Paxton Hoag Astoria, OR USA

Richard, yours are Eves, the followup on the Lilith. Keyboard, mice and monitors are indeed special to the Lilith. The keyboard has a serial, straight ASCII output and goes to the monitor. In the monitor is a serial to parallel convertor and the keyboard data then goes in parallel to the main unit ! The mouse is a 3 key straight quadrature output thingie. The (external) floppy is very particular: it has an Apple II floppy controller card, a small 6502 motherboard in which the apple floppy unit plugs and a serial connection . The backplane has a 200 contact connector, the force required to insert PCB is incredible. My Lilih is once again playing up, I will have to bite the bullet and draw the schematics. Cheap IC sockets might play a role, but substituting a few hundred of them is also a PITA. Jos

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 01:55 pm, Richard wrote: Power supply problems more likely than anything else. Maybe caused by weak capacitors, as those will age more than any other part. Other failure modes will all (mostly) cause an outright failure. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

An ESR meter is a handy device. <URL: http://clientes.netvisao.pt/greenpal/evb1.htm >. In addition to this, you should still use a VOM to check for a shorted cap, and a capacitance meter to verify the value. The ESR meter is nice because it works in-circuit. --jc Richard wrote:

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 04:20 pm, Richard wrote: Depends on where it is, but a scope would probably be the best tool for that particular job... If it's a bypass cap or power supply filter, you should NOT see any signal there! -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

Not as crazy as a PERQ AGW3300 then. The monitor plinth contains a board called the multiplexer. It takes the serial lines from the keyboard and optional tablet, the quadrature and button lines from the mouse, etc, shoves them into a shift register (note, the serial data is not converted to parallel first), sent down to the main box as a fast data stream, then fed into another shift regiser, some outputs of which go to UARTs to accept the seiral data from the keyboard and tablet. The shift register is clocked fast enough that the serial data (1200 baud or something) is unmangled by this. Kersqueeble! Good luck. Having done this for somewhat simpler machines (although still complicated ones), I will say that it's a lot of work (expect to spend months doing it), but you get a very good understanding of the machine's hardware at the end. -tony

256K and 1M 30-pin Simms always were fairly easy to come by; 4M ones if you searched hard; but 16M ones (as mentioned by the orinal message) have always been like hens teeth - and I could have done with a couple for my sound card :-( Andy

Zane H. Healy wrote: I have one! (yes, a single) Paid something like $8 and shipping because apparently neither the seller nor anybody else bothered to read the label pictured in the eBay listing. :) It's in the only box I own that can read a single 128MB SIMM - an A3000 with '060 accelerator. Doc

In article &lt;a0620070ec0054262a527(a)[192.168.1.199]&gt;9]>, "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> writes: This morning I wondered if it wouldn't be possible to reuse older smaller density memory modules like SIMMs by creating a carrier card that held multiple smaller density modules On most machines I've seen, there's enough physical clearance for something larger than a SIMM so you could create a carrier that held 4 32 MB SIMMs so that you could have something that the machine would think was a 128 MB SIMM. It would look god awful ugly, but would do the job! In fact, I've got these IBM 300XL units piling up in my basement from the work purge that could use such a technique to get a few beefy ones cannibalized -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

In article <200601311751.MAA23721 at Sparkle.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> writes: As I look at these, I notice that they're all adapters as opposed to something that gangs up multiple SIMMs to create a higher capacity "SIMM". Anyone seen anything like that? -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

In article <200601311820.NAA24018 at Sparkle.Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> writes: No, that's an adapter because I can't take the whole shebang and plug it into a 30-pin SIMM. See what I mean? It adapts 30-pin SIMMS to 72-pin SIMMs. That's great if I'm moving from a 30-pin SIMM mobo to a 72-pin SIMM mobo, but what if I just want to cram more memory onto my 30-pin SIMM mobo and don't want to shell out $$$ for high density 30-pin SIMMs? (Yeah, I know there are issues with physical clearance on adjacent SIMM slots, let's just leave that aside for the moment.) -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

I believe so too, both because visual inspection indicates that they appear to be made of nothing but sockets, etch runs, and a very few surface-mount passives, and because I once did some experiments and found that a partially-populated adapter appeared as 32-bit words of memory of which some subset of the bits acted unimplemented (writes ignored, reads return all-0 or all-1, I forget which), the subset depending on which sockets were populated. (The adapter I was testing with put one byte in each sub-SIMM, but of course there's no reason the subsets have to be grouped like that.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Yes, I have a few of those around somewhere... The SIMMs have to have the "right" geometry and/or the system has to be able to handle the resulting geometry. I seem to recall that they have locations on them for surface mount chips and switches (to allow the geometry to be adjusted) but they are unpopulated on the ones I have.

Then there is the adapter that I have in my Amiga 3000, it plugged in where the ZIP Chips would go, and let me use standard 72-pin SIMM's (at least I think they're 72-pin, might be 30-pin). It was cheaper than trying to get 16MB of ZIP Chips. Of course I really wish I had the Zorro 3 board a coworker bought about the same time, it lets him put 128MB in his Amiga 3000 (except as far as I know, it's still sitting new in the box). Zane

----- Original Message ----- From: "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 1:44 PM Subject: Re: SIMMs and other memory dongles (was: Common items you passed up where the know,

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 12:38 pm, Richard wrote: I know I've seen such things, in a store that's now long gone, where they were designed to let you re-use your memory in the process of upgrading. If my recollection is correct you could take 4 30-pin parts and stack them up to put into a 72-pin socket... -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

On Tuesday 31 January 2006 01:33 pm, Jules Richardson wrote: Yes. Unlike the "front" and "back" models that were on the page Richard pointed to, the store in question had four kinds, two more factors being "tall" and "short" where the former would stick the SIMMs above the ones in the shorter adapter. I guess this was useful for those machines that had four sockets jammed real close together. I've no idea how any of these would work for stuff that used those sockets where they were laying down at an angle. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

In article <m1F42og-000IyPC at p850ug1>, ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) writes: That's why I figured it should be within a homebrewer's ability and would be handy for collectors of old stuff like me :-). -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

What do you mean by 'the opposite'? Stuff you didn't grab and didn't become rare/desired Stuff you grabbed and didn't become rare/desired Stuff you grabbed and did become rare/desired -tony

Obviously. I would put most clone PCs (particularly 386+) in this category. Me too. Well, it's useful to me. An example would be my TRS-80 Model 4. I still use it, it's got a reasonable disk controller (WD1793 based) and I have some good disk hacking utilities. I fired it up the other day to back up a BBC micro disk (it was easier to do that than set up a Beeb, and I wanted to make a backup before I did anything eise). But I hardly think Model 4 is going to make me rich.... I'm remarkably bad at getting stuff that has collector value :-). Many of my machines are technically interesting (which is why I grabbed them), some are even historically interesting, but for some reason collectors don't go crazy for PERQs, HP9830s, and the like. And almost none of my stuff is 'collector grade' I don't have original boxes, etc. And it looks used. For example I have a fair number of old HP handhelds, but they all have minor dings, etc on them. This doesn't bother me -- I still _use_ them. But the value to a collector, even of things like my 16C, 9100B, etc is probably minimal. The least valuable HP I own is one that I would never give up. An old, battered, HP45. The reason is that I built it. I was given a load of junk at an HPCC meeting mad there were enough bits to make a 45. The chips on the logic board came from 2 or 3 machines, the displays aren't all the same sixe (These machines have 3 5-digit display modules in them, HP used 2 different character height ones, you're supposed to have all 3 the same in a particular machine, obviously), and so on. To a collector it's worthless. To me, because I got it going, and because doing that taught me a lot about how the classic series HPs work, it's priceless. -tony

At 9:00 PM -0500 1/30/06, Teo Zenios wrote: Not really computer equipment, but the item that most comes to mind would be the "Strikers 1945" MVS Cartridge for the Neo Geo arcades. Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

Tony Duell wrote: True. But if you had grabbed them you would have been able to cash them in four-five years ago (when they went for ?400 or so) or even now, when they still command ?150+ ... ... and you'd be able to afford a few more VIAs :-) Having said that, I've never managed to look ahead and pick stuff up to fund my hobby either, so you are not entirely alone. Antonio -- Antonio carlini arcarlini at iee.org

On 1/30/06, Teo Zenios <teoz at neo.rr.com> wrote: vacuum tubes.

On 2/1/2006 at 11:53 PM Sridhar Ayengar wrote: I can remember when the Michigan Ave. surplus dealers were selling WW II surplus 1625's (807s with a 7 pin base and 12.6v heaters) for $10 per original case of 50. The 50's and 60's were a very heady time for military surplus. I still have a shipboard general-coverage receiver that last saw service in Okinawa in 1945. I run it from an old WE telco power supply. Not a bit of hum in the output. Maybe we'll see some surplus from the current entanglements, someday. Cheers, Chuck

In article <Pine.SUN.4.20.0602020944520.3090-100000 at osfn.org>, William Donzelli <aw288 at osfn.org> writes: I see lots of stuff going through govliquidation.com, but most of it isn't very interesting and like ebay, they've eliminated market inefficiencies which translates to fewer good deals for scroungers like us. What is mostly frustrating is that they don't just wipe hard drives out there, some of which are interesting, but don't have any kind of storage to go with them. If you thought it was difficult to find classic computers, try getting isolated storage units for classic computers! -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

On 2/2/2006 at 9:47 AM William Donzelli wrote: CAY-46077, part of an RBM-4 installation. The service records were kept on a sheet of paper attached to the inside of the top access lid. Made by Westinghouse. That's a shame. If I think of the things that made electronics fun back in the 1950's and 60's, it was the availability of components scavenged from old radios and TVs and military surplus. If you were on a budget, you usually could afford to buy a "Command Set" and rig up a power supply for it. A novice could build a very serviceable CW transmitter using parts for the final). War surplus crystals and a key and you were in business. At worst, you could use the remainder of what you found to build a workable regen receiver. I don't know how someone would being to learn and tinker with electronics today. Most semiconductors one runs into are highly minaturized and highly integrated; scavenging is a lot more difficult. Cheers, Chuck

In article <f4eb766f0602020942o2c0189f1u5ec663eeeac00681 at mail.gmail.com>, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> writes: So how do you scavenge them? Turn on a blowtorch and wave vigorously on the underside untilt eh connector comes loose from the board? ;-) -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

Nice provenance. The RBM-4 was used by the Marine Corps as an advance medium power radio station for things like beach landings. The transmitter is a TBW-4, and together they make an MM-4, the complete set. I would bet that only ten or so MMs saw use in any landing, perhaps even less. Your radio probably handled some VERY important traffic. More info offlist if you want. William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org

The terms depend on how far and how much. If loading is a issue, that could change things. For example, if i need to drag a rack up from a cellar with only the help of an old man, I will want something for the effort. Once again, cheap - especially if you have ever priced movers to do this work! I probably will, especially if I am still a bit short. William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org