I dunno, in my short stint back I feel like it's been worth it for me; already I've gotten hooked up with some nice Q-bus stuff at a great price (thanks again!), I was able to hook a guy up with a bounty of Micro Channel cards under terms he felt were great (hope you are enjoying them!) and I've learned a lot of neat stuff about Apple internal politics, A/UX, PDP-11, etc. as well as just generally getting clued into all the interesting work other list members are doing... I wouldn't write all that off as garbage noise. It does feel different than the old days, I am not sure if it's just fewer people subscribed; I mean, certainly the world is much different now in terms of what people are finding and therefore discussing; the character of what is being dumped out the loading dock, sent to property disposition and being sold on the used market is much different; nowadays to find something even like a 68k Mac (which back in 2000 wouldn't even really have merited much discussion as a classic computer) is very rare; you really have to seek it out, almost (of course there are always exceptions). People who want it already have it, otherwise either it is gone or perhaps rarely for sale on eBay at a high price. I suppose much more is now cursorily known as well; much of this is thanks to your efforts on Bitsavers, Al (and, me having the good fortune to have a discussion with you personally here, I'd like to thank you a million times over for your effort in that project)... Now there's often no need to ask about it here (and potentially generate a discussion - which always has the potential to take interesting turns) when you can just go find the service manual, code listing, ROM dump, print set, etc. preserved on the Web for all! On the whole, I think that's a great thing. Maybe not so good for the level of discourse here on this specific list, but a great thing for historians and preservationists, that so much information has been made free. I'm not really looking for old computers here in any kind of mercenary fashion; my collection is mostly complete; my girlfriend has been plenty tolerant as it is, LOL. It's nice to be able to swap parts with folks, or maybe pass along the odd item I can't use, but that's not my main focus here at all... I like to read the discussions; it's interesting to get the historical context from actual veterans of the field back in the days when much of what we are discussion was contemporary technology, the behind-the-scenes stories, etc. Maybe I have the odd question about old hardware or electronic troubleshooting I might want to ask, that's it. I might also proffer opinions from time to time :) But it's always good to leave oneself open for opportunities, no? It can never be, if the opportunity doesn't exist? You can't win if you don't buy a ticket? Certainly if one is in acquisition mode, it's always worthwhile to keep an eye on Craigslist, the curb, the dumpster down at the local University property disposition yard (just kidding! at my institution it is fenced off! LOL) etc. but my inclination of opinion is to keep the list open, just to not miss that one interesting drive-by that might have been. Of course I'm not the one doing the moderation! Obviously the guys doing the heavy lifting are free to call the tune!! Either way the list is working just fine for me. Best, Sean On Sat, Jul 12, 2014 at 6:59 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: