Why is LGR a jackass? - Ethan -- : Ethan O'Toole

Eh, friends of mine were talking about that place like 2 months prior to LGR's video. Just remember, it's not the only one. There are likely to be similar places around flyover America. It takes a really dedicated person to travel across the country. As long as the crap goes into nerd hands versus the landfill, so be it? "Me only." So people are upset that the magic well was exposed. I see the same stuff with the arcade community. They're quick to show off all the machines they get for $50/ea from some place then they're all for sale at $1500/ea two months later. Eh, it will be all $50 again or less soon enough. Just be happy that anyone cares about old useless computers? -- : Ethan O'Toole

Plus it was already on Reddit and other places before LGR found out.

I doubt .1% of LGR's followers are going to show up. Perhaps a few will inquire. Right, and much of the younger generation is shut out of decent property ownership thanks to the asset bubble (which includes retrocomputers.) So this will curtail a lot of them from trying to aquire huge loads of old computers since they're presented with overpriced housing near the job centers. The half of the population profits from this thinks it's good for some reason. That's why a lot of people will watch it on youtube instead. -- : Ethan O'Toole

Yes, some of us were called on the first day the whole thing developed. Yes, I realize this. Much of my business is estate and failed business cleanouts. Oh, and don't forget THE OWNER AND FAMILY. It is about them, right? They are the primary beneficiaries of whatever happens to the pile. We should be grateful to them. No, it is about "control". Back, two months ago or so, the group that knew and were visiting CR was fairly small - maybe a few hundred people, most collectors and/or dealers, many knowing each other. Misfits could likely be pointed out, maybe so an eye could be kept on them. But now that it has world exposure, everyone knows about it, including potentially every scrap thief in the DFW area. They now know the backstory if they see the video and do some research beyond Youtube. And they will know when the place will be opened, and when it will be closed. They will know the internal layout of the place. They might know, with the family in such a state, the alarm may or may not work. Pull up a trailer, hire 10 migrant workers, forge some papers saying they are a hired contractor (just in case someone gets nosey), and in a day every bit of electronics is gone. There is plenty there to make them a good buck on scrap. All this can happen in the blink of an eye. What do you think the owner and family would get out of that scenario? Remember the owner and family? Yes, this happens all the time. Fake contractors break into and empty storage lockers all them time - even modern ones with video and such. Even full one family houses get hit. A few houses down from my old place, some fake movers did just that - cleared a whole house while the owner was on vacation. And this was in a nice neighborhood, during a nice day during a normal week. No one said a word to the cops until it was all over. I am very happy that the guys stepped up to liquidate the place, and I think they are doing a great job. The LGR video is not really helping them, and greatly increased the chances for a disaster. Oh, I did not mention how some of those misfits can throw their own wrenches in the works. Piss one of them off and he calls the Fire Marshall. Some dick did that when I was cleaning out Compass so many years ago (if you remember the Compass Teletype cleanout in NJ, you have been on this list too long!), and delayed things for a couple of weeks. -- Will

On Jul 17, 2019, at 9:39 AM, Daniel Seagraves via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: I want to do my part in turning the tide and say that I have a serious degree of appreciation for all the stuff that you?ve personally done for Lisp Machine preservation. Meroko and LambdaDelta are OUTSTANDING work and are a major contribution to the field. (Also, the way Meroko simulates every individual bus cycle is really something!) I hope the people who scream at you are the ones who walk away instead. They don?t deserve you or your awesome work. -- Chris

Sigh. I searched for retro and vintage computer shops in Dallas as I was there the last two weeks. This place I think did come up but with no real pictures or info I couldn't tell if it was legit. Oh well. Maybe I'll make my way back before they close if they open doors for looking around. I went to Perot museum looking for their vintage computers but didn't see any and I think most staff members are too young to remember the museum having any. (bust). However the national gaming museum wasn't bad. Smallish but they did a great job having systems up and running for folks to touch and play on. Kudos to them for supporting the interactive experience.

Sorry but I haven?t a clue w cr liquidation is. Sent from my iPad On Jul 17, 2019, at 8:00 AM, William Donzelli via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

On 7/17/19 12:54 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote: The subject only mentions the U.S.A. If we assume the continental U.S.A., that's ~2.9 *Billion* square miles. (According to Google.) Brief searching narrows it down to somewhere in Texas. So that's down to 268 thousand square miles. (According to Google.) There may have been other location information, like drive time / distance from another known city, buried in this thread. So, I think asking for some clarification where Computer Reset is located at is a reasonable, and not pointless, thing to do. -- Grant. . . . unix || die

Check out that LGR guys video, he makes fun videos -- : Ethan O'Toole

Cleanouts like this are a big part of my business. CR is by no means small, but is also not that big. The last big place I was in - well, the entire CR space would have been part of one of the floors of the building. One of six floors and basement. And some outbuildings. That was Radio Research (now gone - and it was not vintage computers, but other vintage tech). Too much exposure can bring out the creeps and crooks. -- Will

Was this not aimed at me? "My impression is that you don't grasp the size of the place and the amount of stuff." I do. Know you know - but lose the attitude, please. Scrap. Good old-timey pre-2000 ewaste. It happens more when the goods are advertised - like a Youtube video. I bet a lot of gold bugs saw the LGR video in their suggestion feed that otherwise would not know about it. Oh boy...you might not know how these guys can work. Go back and read one of my posts in this thread. 10 guys, 12 hours, every bit of scrap gone... Anyway, I'm out. I have things to do, like deal with my own pile of stuff. -- Will

My net service dropped out yesterday, hence delayed reply. I did NOT expect that thread to take off. At 10:14 PM 16/07/2019 -0700, Al Kossow wrote: Ah yes, now I see there was exactly one previous mention a month ago on 2019-06-12 https://marc.info/?l=classiccmp&m=156035869326953&w=2 or http://www.classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/2019-June/048024.html Were there other discussions perhaps, that didn't mention the shop name? Anyway maybe some may like to see the jackass's video of the huge collection, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvM82T3C2Ik or perhaps go buy stuff to help out the invalid owners? Btw Al did you have any sources for this? So that was 15 years ago? Are there any photos online? Just curious. Btw, I have at least three times seen large warehouses full of tech treasure destroyed. It's the standard routine in Australia. Literally. Because for a long time the government charged import duty on everything brought into the country. And there was a regulation that in many cases that duty could be recovered by the importer, if they had the equipment landfilled in the presence of a tax inspector. Ha ha, I spent one Christmas eve stripping the laser optics and electronics out of about 20 laser disk players, that a video arcade company I did contract software for, had imported. Then they discovered the players were unsuitable. So, to the tip with them, to be buried, to recover the tax. Except my employers were informal enough to think that was a waste, and ask me if I wanted to 'modify' the players first. I had one evening to do it. Fortunately also a stack of bricks, to make the units convincingly heavy after gutting them. That tax insanity is now gone. Leaving the depreciation, insurance and tradein insanities in operation. Depreciation: Company book keepers depreciate the value of capital investments, over the operating life of the equipment. They get a yearly tax break for this 'expense.' Once the equipment reaches end of depreciation period, theoretically it is worth zero. At that point the company will have it destroyed. Because to sell it would imply it still has value, and that would cast the bookkeeping proceedures (and the tax benefits) into doubt (according to the accountants.) And they don't want to just give it away, because there are safety and liability issues with that. Insurance: Typically when equipment is damaged and an insurance claim made, the equipment gets destroyed. Because the insurance companies are afraid they might get scammed. So they insist on proof of destruction. Tradein: Because Australia is a small tech-market and virtually everything is imported, companies like HP, Tektronix DEC, etc (their local distributors) hated to see their products get loose into the second hand market. So they offered very significant tradein deals on old stuff. Which they would then generally destroy. Unless their staff made off with it first. For a while I worked around the corner from the HP Sydney office. Dropped in and asked if they had any 2nd hand gear for sale. The engineer who spoke with me in the front office made a show of explaining that all tradeins were destroyed. He was making sure his superiors heard him toeing the company line. Later he offered me a few items via his car boot. All really old, valve stuff, though I did buy a couple. http://everist.org/NobLog/20140324_HP_relics.htm This is why Australia is a desert in regards second hand computing and test equipment. Guy

LGR is short for Lazy Game Reviews. His channel used to be reviews of old MS-DOS games or something. Random dude in NC, and slowly a following built of his videos. A co-worker of mine some 5 years ago would watch those and Computer Chronicles, so he was the first place I heard about LGR videos. He produces two videos a week I think. As far as I know, it's his livelyhood as the youtube following built that big. A friend actually went thrifting with him a few weeks ago. The same friend I believe is headed to TX to visit the Reset place in a week or two -- mainly looking for stuff for his museum which is tied to another guys museum from this community. Agreed! It's cool that younger generation is finding some of the older stuff interesting. I would have thought it would have ended at emulation. The fact that people are doing 386 and 486 computer builds now is strange to me, I'm not going to lie. But we all have our funky hobbies. I think I recently sold a luggable computer on eBay to one of them. It worked 100% when I shipped it but arrived "broken." I'm still wondering if the guy damaged the CPU card (PICMG) in order to refund once he realized the keyboard was something he wasn't after. Cost me $100+ in shipping all lost. -- : Ethan O'Toole