I want your old microcomputers from the 70s and 80s. I do NOT want any common PC clone. I am looking mainly for stuff that doesn't exist in any way shape or form today. I am looking for rarer models, as I already own most of the more common micros of the early micro-revolution. Please e-mail me at dastar(a)crl.com with what you got and we can work out a deal. Thanks. ---END USENET MESSAGE--- So this guy, Gary, responds and tells me he has an IMSAI 8080 and a Victor 9000 he wouldn't mind getting rid of. SCORE! So anyway, he used to be an attendee of the Homebrew Computer Club, which if you don't know was a bunch of hackers and geeks (including of course Jobs and Wozniak) who got together every week or month in (I believe) either Mountain View or Sunnyvale, to show off the computers they were building. Read Steven Levy's _Hackers_ for the complete (and very entertaining) story. He was telling me all these cool stories. One was about how a Lawrence Livermore National Lab employee made a bunch of paper-tape copies of Gates' BASIC when it first came out and brought them to a meeting of the HCC, claiming that on his way over, a box of stuff dropped from a bus, and when he went to go check it out he found all these weird paper tapes in it (40 or so) and that everyone was welcome to have them, whereby he began tossing them out into the audience. Gary of course got one of them, and invited me to look at and touch it under the condition that I didn't drool on it and muss it up. It was in perfect condition! The neatest thing about it is that it had "Z80 BASIC COPYRIGHT MICROSOFT" punched into it (that isn't the actual message, I've forgotten what it said already). He said the week after, Bill himself showed up and whined to the crowd, asking "How am I supposed to make any money off this if you guys are pirating my stuff?" I'm sure, in hindsight, Bill certainly doesn't mind the fact that the Microsoft BASIC standard created by the piracy of his original BASIC has made him a $32 billion man today. He went on to tell me the stories about how he built his IMSAI and applied fixes and patches for flaws in the design, and showed me the schematics and took me through some of the documentation. He's a really neat guy. We're going to be staying in touch. He's moving soon and he says when he cleans his garage out and figures what else he has he will probably let me have some of it, including his full run of Byte magazine starting from issue 4. He also has a CompuPro 8/16 that he wanted to hang onto, as well as a Heathkit H19 terminal that he built from the kit, but he says he might not want to take them with him. So anyway, that's what a day of tooling around the bay area got me. I also met Paul Coad at a parking lot sale and we ran into Doug Coward (you may have checked out his Web museum page, I forget the URL). It was a good day. Sam ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass Sam ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass