Ok, the weekend's not even over, and here's how I did: 101 Online - A neat little terminal with a 9" screen. The keyboard covers the screen and flips down with the push of a button. It has a built-in 4800bps modem. It was used to connect to some online service in California at some time or another. The whole thing is in this cute 10"x10"x10" package - $5 Laser 50 with manuals - $4 (Hi Bill!) Commodore 64, Commodore 64C (two of 'em, one seems to be this weird clone since the plastic looks different from the other one and it has no markings), two 1541 drives, two Star NX-1000C dot matrix printers - All free Data General One (Model 2) laptop. Two questions: How did the model 2 differ from the model 1? And I didn't get a power supply with this, but was told by a couple people all it requires is a special three-prong power cord. The receptacle is an oval with three conductors. Anyone know about this? - $15 2 Commodore 1541 drives, 2 Commodore 1571 drives - $8 DEC Rainbow 100 with all the trimmings (extra cards, all software and manuals) - $10 VIC-20 Modem - $1 Commodore 64 user's guide, VIC-20 User's Guide - $1 (the guy I bought this stuff from claims to have 7 PDP-11s and "several" PDP-8s that he's been hording. Needless to say I threatened him with great bodily harm if he didn't give me some. We agreed to meet to discuss the "free taking" of one of each system. He also has lots of other DEC stuff for sale and for give-away to those who would give it good homes. I will keep us posted on any late-breaking developments. He also said he has a Cyber hard drive unit which sounds like the size of a dishwasher as he described it. I think the model number was 690s or something. I know I'm way off. If anyone wants this its in California. Apparently he has tons of mostly DEC stuff he's been collecting from local colleges and universtities. Again, I'll keep us posted). And let's see, oh yeah, I'm not done! ZX-81 with manuals/power supply and... Victor 9000 and... IMSAI 8080! IMSAI MPU-A (Rev 4) 8080A CPU card IMSAI SIO (Rev 3) Serial card DCHayes Modem (I am assuming 300baud...S100!) Disk Jockey 2D/B 8" drive card (and some 8" drive...I forget the manufacturer) (4) Digital Research Company Memory Boards (I think each one is 16K) All manuals/schematics/notes plus some extra IMSAI fron panel overlays All this from the original owner for $100. What a bargain. Ok, this guy is cool. First of all, to you guys complaining that you never get anything good, here's the message I posted on my local forsale newsgroup which brought about this acquisition: ---BEGIN USENET MESSAGE--- Path: nnrp1.crl.com!dastar From: dastar(a)crl.com (Sam Ismail) Newsgroups: ba.market.computers Subject: WANT TO BUY YOUR OLD-ASSED COMPUTERS! Date: 11 Jun 1997 07:00:28 GMT Organization: Gigantor Industries, Ltd. Lines: 12 Message-ID: <5nliec$b6s$1(a)nnrp1.crl.com> Reply-To: spam(a)spam.org (CHANGE THIS REPLY-TO FIELD IF YOU WANT ME TO GET YOUR MESSAGE) NNTP-Posting-Host: crl9.crl.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Xref: nnrp1.crl.com ba.market.computers:90318 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