-- Charles P. Hobbs (SoCalTip) I helped sell an installation of 60 of these little buggers to G.E. back in 1984-5. The cheapest I ever saw them since was $150 at "Wierd Stuff Warehouse" 5 years later. All I have today is a nice set of manuals. Tek's documentation rivaled H.P.'s in clarity and construction (I'd actually put them slightly ahead of DEC). They were a little slow but had enough memory for a decent review sized plot. I think the specs allowed for something like 128 byte commands saved locally behind the Fkeys. One of our team hacked it so as to get a key to store over 8K. There were some notable early market failures from Tek doing Vector paint in raster HW, but by this time they were really getting it right. Ask me sometime about their ink-jet printer... If you ever had to clean one of them you really got to to play 'Joe Surgeon'. "Brought to you by David Letterman and Heart Bypass surgery" "Clamp!" "Sponge!" John A.

On Thu, Apr 13, 2000 at 12:56:58AM -0500, Charles P. Hobbs (SoCalTip) wrote: IIRC the 4105 used the Hitachi HD63484 graphics processor, maybe the 4107 used the same thing? If so it was a pretty cool chip, if a bit slow, with all kinds of fancy commands for lines and circles and rectangles and region fill etc. It was used on some of the early Number 9 boards too. John Wilson D Bit

Looks like they don't get out much, $2,000 for a pallet of 50 486's, what a joke.

Maybe they're just waiting for the right victim--er-customer, who just must have 8" disks right away, and they're willing to pay late-1970's prices for a box. . . (A side note: I got into the computer hobby/business when 5 1/4" disk drives were more commonly used than 8". I remember a box of 10 disks costing about $50. There was one computer store in town that would sell you a single disk for $5--if they weren't too busy chasing after that 30K consulting bid that never materialized. This was in early 1982, when our friendly local computer store stopped selling computers to the general public in favor of being "Business Consultants". If I recall correctly, they closed in late 82 or early 83, and the doctor's office next door expanded into their space.)

I visited their web site and was, if I may say, resoundingly underimpressed. The selection was modest, the prices bordering on outrageous, and the site itself badly in need of work, though that's mostly to make all the items in a given context relevant to that page. Had he had sufficient "interesting" hardware, I'd have bookmarked him. However . . . Like the dog in the barnyard ." . . sometimes ye gits chicken . . . sometimes ye gts feathuhs . . . " Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter Pachla <peter.pachla(a)wintermute.org.uk> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, April 14, 2000 2:47 PM Subject: Re: www.recycledgoods.com (was: RE: Tektronix 4107 Hi Charles, Quite, I remember the first box of 10 Nashua 5.25" floppies which I bought in 1983 set me back ?30 (about $45?). Yes, the same "shop" I bought the box of 10 from was charging ?5 each for them....it was a student supply shop at the Polytechnic I was at though.... Things were no better when 3.5" discs came along here though. Again, I recall paying around ?30 for a box of 10 discs when I bought my first Atari ST in summer '86. At the time the local Sony shop were charging a whopping ?8 (yes EIGHT!) each for them, dropping to ?5 each if you bought 10 in one go (for some reason they wouldn't actually sell you a box of 10!?). Needless to say they dropped their prices quite quickly. TTFN - Pete. -- Hardware & Software Engineer. Sound Engineer. Collector of Arcade Machines, Games Consoles & Obsolete Computers (esp DEC) peter.pachla(a)wintermute.org.uk | www.wintermute.org.uk --

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Time to re-oil the bribe machine most likely. I think this happens fairly regularly, and then very soon its business as usual. OTOH I think it would be just dandy of all those containers stop going over. I have no idea why we allow tons of computers to go so cheap to a area with no respect for software property rights, or why their goverment keeps trying to stop it. Of course it is pretty hard to keep your thumb on people when they have access to the net, maybe that scares them. It should.

On Thu, 13 Apr 2000, Joe wrote: Does that mean that it will all show up on e-bay? On Thu, 13 Apr 2000, Will Jennings wrote: Please identify where you are located! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com [Berkeley CA, getting rid of >1000 sq ft of stuff real soon]