On 01/18/2012 08:01 PM, Evan Koblentz wrote: Steve has for some reason quoted himself. So the address at the bottom of the mail is his. /P

So he has 990 items worth $1000 each? or 9999 items worth $100 each? There are not that many Apple items worth major money and the rare ones that are have to be in good working condition. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gene Buckle" <geneb at deltasoft.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 4:07 PM Subject: Re: Mac Museum

On 1/18/12 1:23 PM, TeoZ wrote: he was a PC recycler. what he has is what you get through that channel. http://web.me.com/macabbott1/macabb.com/List_of_Macs.html

At 04:42 PM 1/18/2012, Evan Koblentz wrote: And if you were a recycler and someone brought you a computer you coveted, you'd disassemble it and scrap it? - John

On 1/18/2012 3:41 PM, Mouse wrote: I'd rather see stuff kept in one piece than scrapped any day. Only problem I see is if he was an actual non-profit as some recyclers are. Most won't, or can't, sell to the general public though. All sorts of headaches when profit starts coming in.

On Wed, 18 Jan 2012, Jules Richardson wrote: Bill Harrah included in his collection one new Ford from every year - a standing order direct with the factory. It was a massive collection, and for SOME makes, comprehensively complete. When he died, it was referred to as a "1930 used car lot", and was immediately stripped down, sold off, dismantled, and scrapped, keeping just a few choice "examples". Wanna see the first car with Kettering's electric starter or point/condenser ignition? NOT ANY MORE. I watched them auction off a Scarab, and I went home in tears. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

coveted, you'd disassemble it and scrap it? - John It's the method and price that offend me. People bring stuff to a recycler; they don't figure he will try to flip it for a million dollars. Or if people hear that he's a collector, then same deal -- collect it, and when you can't anymore, then send it to another good home(s) -- but trying to grossly profit from stuff he presumably obtained free/cheap, and much of which came his way with intentions to be recycled? That's just wrong.

How do you know what went on? I am not a recylcer, but as you all know, I do collect (and use) various items of old technology. Now, if sosoembody offers me soemthing valuable and I don't feel they should know this, then I tell them, up front, that it is worth \pounds xxx. For example, a neighbour once gave me some very nice valve audio equipment that had belonged ot heer late husband, in exchange for me doing some simple (to me) repairs for he. I told her what I honestly believed the value to be aat that time and she still gave it to me, as whe wanted it to go to a 'good home'. Conversely, if somebody here offers me a piece of classic computer equipment, I feel they should have doen their homework and have some idea fo the value. Of course if they ask what an HPxxxx is worth, I might well reply 'Well one sold on E-bay last month for $150' (or whatever). As fas as I am aware you have no idea what this recycler/collector said ot the people who were giving him said machines. I don't see how you can then accuse him of cheating them. -tony

In article <CANij+dfniZ9iTr72Zk4jb0nNAykRXi+kjLYvYJa08h65W6HLJw at mail.gmail.com>, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> writes: Honestly, most people would be *offended* if you destroyed a perfectly good machine instead of repurposing it. "Recycling" isn't just about reducing inputs to their constituent atoms. The most efficient form of recycling is reuse for another purpose. Except for the county landfill, every place I know locally that recycles computers first examines them to see if they can be reasonably put to some sort of reuse. Reusing and repurposing computers is *much* more "environmentally friendly" than scrapping them. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 version available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

Where it gets picked apart by an army of young men, and sent to the mills for refining. This is not 1985 anymore. -- Will

The thing is that India and China is FULL of a bunch of capitalists these days, so those fields are FULL of money. Bring in a container of unsorted scrap, and assign it to a guy to pick apart. Yes, it looks like a mess, but it is a work in progress. What junkyard ANYWHERE doesn't have toxic runoff, anyway? My local yard in New York looks like hell, and is probably a toxic stew, but the guy moves a hell of a bunch of metal to be reused. The (typically) young men and teenagers come in from the farms, where there is no money to be made, and can work their asses off picking apart anything into its basic materials, and make a bunch of money to move to the big city and start a business and/or save money to get married. Those piles of plastic monitor cases you see videos of? They are worth more than steel in China. The monitor cases in the piles today that make such good news footage will not be the same monitor cases in the piles in a week. And the burning of wire to strip the insulation? Well, they figured out that the shred and float tank method doesn't burn up their copper, so the bonfires pretty much died years ago. And the CRTs? Until just a few years ago, they were refurbished and put back into televisions and sent back to the US. No, things have not gotten worse. The Indian and Chinese scrapmen have figured out that efficient operation means more money in their pockets. Money means EVERYTHING to these people. -- Will

You think too highly of the general public. The general public feeling about recycling is a mile wide and an inch deep. Once the stuff is out of their hair, they lose interest very quickly. Yes, I agree, but there is pretty much always far more supply than demand for the repurposed equipment. Keep in mind that the scrap stream is now *very* efficient. Stuff that goes in comes out as over 99 percent good material. There is very little that we have not yet figured out what to do with (ferrites, fiberglass, glass). Everything else is ca$h. It is a good business model. But, what do you do with the excess? Grind it. Sending the stuff to the county landfill is NOT a good business model. -- Will

On 19 Jan 2012 at 18:53, William Donzelli wrote: I think it depends on the age of the equipment. I can find an occasional use for a 20MHz 80386 system (ISA slots), but much of the old stuff I have just sits in a pile. I started out running my local server (DNS masquerade, radio and email) on a P1/100 MHz system using an early RedHat release. Now, the same function is served by a thin client with a solid-state disk that consumes a fraction of the power. No floppy, CD-ROM or fan-- perhaps 15W conumption. I feel a little silly having it hooked to a 1400VA UPS. I suspect that the UPS consumes more than the thin client. So which is more efficient? Wouldn't we all be better off using the old machine to make cans for Nalley's Chili and reclaim whatever metals the rest of the machine has? In our local case, the disassembly is used to train developmentally disabled folks. The recycler also runs a storefront and donates a lot of usable gear to people down on their luck. My Beige G3 came go. 6 years ago, it set me back $30. Knowing what they do, I happily forked the money over to them. At the same time, they had a bunch of NIB Farallon 10-port 100BaseT routers for $5 each. I bought a couple and have been using them ever since as network hubs. They're a legit non-profit that relies on a small staff and many volunteers. --Chuck

--- On Wed, 1/18/12, Evan Koblentz <evan at snarc.net> wrote: How? A recycler isn't bound by any kind of law that says that everything they take in, they must destroy - except for the individual cases where there are contracts with, for example, the government, to destroy sensitive equipment. If you bring a PC to a recycler to get rid of it, there is nothing wrong with them reselling it, or selling the parts, etc. That's why it is *your* responsibility to erase any sensitive information off the hard drive first. It's just like a junkyard. They buy wrecked/broken cars and sell them for parts or scrap metal. For example, I recently needed a mirror for a Camry. I bought one on eBay from a scrap metal dealer. Someone probably wrecked the car and sold it to him, and he's harvesting parts off it and selling them at a profit. I'm happy, because I got a mirror cheaply and easily, and he's happy, because he sold me a mirror. Tell me where this is a problem? It's how the whole surplus/scrap market works. There is nothing at all wrong with a recycler profiting by selling used machines or parts. It's what they do for a living. If it weren't for surplus dealers, and recyclers selling useful stuff, this hobby would be a hell of a lot harder. -Ian

I don;t get this Most (if not all) people who give their old computers to recyclers don't much care what happens to them. They have no further use for the machine. They may want to keep toxic matrerials out of the landfill (but that would be met if the machine is kept in operation by the recylcer), they don;t want any personal data that may remain on the machin spread aroudn (but there's n osuggestion this is occuring). Presumably you think it would be OK for the recycler to extract any nmaterials of value from the machine and keep the profits himself. So what's the problem with keepign the entire machine intact? -tony

On 18/01/2012 22:28, "Al Kossow" <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: The TAM is the only one I'd like out of that list, maybe the original 128K too but they're around. Millions eh. His advisers need to stop smoking. -- Adrian/Witchy Binary Dinosaurs creator/curator Www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk - the UK's biggest private home computer collection?

Strikes me as a hoarder, not a collector. Nobody in our collecting world strives to have every obscure model of (for example) the Performa. He's just another crazy Machead. If he got over his head and now he's stuck .... oh well. I hope the machines eventually find good homes, but it's hard to respect how he is going about it.

Being that this is classic computing, perhaps in Altairian dollars. In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian Pobble Beads, and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. It exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise it is very simple to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a deranged imagination. -HHGTTG How many R at RE Macs (y'know, the ones with the developers' signatures on the inside) does it take to be worth one Altair?