New subject: I EBay snipered these PDP extenders last night. Did anyone else see them?

18 Oct 1999

I got two quad (looks to be originals for the 11) PDP extender cards for
$21.50! I had to get up at 1 in the morning to nail it. If the spacing is
the same on either side of the middle "slot" then I guess I just have to cut
them down the middle for the PDP 8? Sorry "flipchip".

http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=179610883

The guy had it listed under "Photo Electronics" with no PDP nor Digital in
the subject/description.

john

-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Christopher Finney &lt;af-list(a)wfi-inc.com&gt;
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
&lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt;
Date: Monday, October 18, 1999 3:03 AM
Subject: Re: EBaying; howling after an auction

...

On Mon, 18 Oct 1999, Dave McGuire wrote:

> >Sniping is the art of ignorance on the value of something.
>
>   Huh?  No, man.  Sniping is a means to an end.  Nothing more, nothing less.
...
 > Not entirely "nice", not entirely what
the eBay designers had in mind, but
...
   extremely
effective. 
I'd have to agree with Marvin. You don't bid early on something because
you don't want to attract attention to something that might be mis-labeled
or poorly described. If other people don't know what it is, and the
bidding price stays low, you bid in the last 5 seconds and get it for much
less that you would have had a bunch of people been after it.

Myself, I go on eBinges. I might spend a couple of days pouring over ads
for stuff that I've been looking for for a long time. Sometimes I buy
things just to buy them; once I bought an IBM thermal printer for $.25 and
paid $5.00 shipping for it. Recently I got an IBM Fortran manual for a
buck or so, and the guy just sent it without payment. What else...oh yeah,
I picked up a SCSI adapter for an Atari ST for $1.00, because the guy had
it listed only as "SCI Adapter"...total fluke, because I myself misspelled
"scsi" in the search...

I'm certainly no power user of eBay (shallow pockets, too lazy to ship
things), but I find that their format drives me to "snipe" things, but I
look at it, as Marvin said, as a Sealed Auction way to buy. People who try
to be *fair* about bidding there, when their system doesn't cater to the
kind of fairness that allows everyone to have their turn to bid until
the last call, just end up frustrated and disappointed.

My .02,

Aaron