"Jeff Kaneko" <jeff.kaneko(a)ifrsys.com> wrote: I think Weird Stuff pulled something like this around December 1995, not too long before they vacated their Kern Avenue storefront. Yeah, right, like I am going to pay $75 for used-and-abused 8" drives when the dealer hasn't even taken the time to sort out single/double sided let alone single/double density. Halted has a decent store of small parts. They are good for that, if like me you are not real good at organization and planning your component needs with enough lead time to deal with mail-order. And they keep their selection of connectors better organized than some other nearby outfits (Haltek in Mountain View just has no concept of how to do this -- well, actually I haven't been there in a while, and have been avoiding the connector aisles there for quite a while longer). Sometimes they have hard-to-find small parts. E.g. three or four years ago they had sourced some of those funky SCSI connectors like Sun used to use: the female D connectors with 50 pins arranged as three rows. Specifically these were the IDC flavor designed to crimp onto flat cable -- just the ticket if you were setting up a disk box for a Sun! Pricey at $11, but the thought of the amount of time I would spend soldering 50 little wires from a flat cable into 50 little cups was a good motivating factor. So I bought a few, and I gather other folks did too because one time I found myself waiting for them to get new stock in. Yeah, I have seen them perpetrate other crocks, like the HP 2100 mini that they were selling for $100? $200? I can't remember. What I do remember is that someone had thoughtfully removed all the cards from the CPU, and with my naturally cynical outlook I expect that means they were easy pickings for gold recovery. To be fair there were some other peripherals there, but the hassle involved in moving the lot (all set in a 19" rack) and finding some place to put it was additional discouragement -- besides which I did not have as much experience with the other bits and so was not able to determine on the spot whether they had already been gutted (though it looked like some cabling had been removed as well). It's not entirely clear to me how the surplus-electronics business works here in Sillycon Valley, but one thing is obvious: the primary moneymaker is in the movement of large lots, probably from auctions and companies seeking to be rid of obsolete hardware, through the surplus business and I am guessing on the way to precious-metals recovery operations. If the surplus businesses see little bits that they think will work better being sold as onesies-and-twosies to people looking for upgrades/spares for their trailing-edge PCs (or to people looking for deals on test equipment), then those will come out to the showroom floor. And that can be a profitable niche too, so they try to price accordingly (i.e. cheap enough to make it look like a better deal than upgrading, but not so cheap as to lose much of the profit they could make -- gotta pay for that showroom floor somehow). This has a side effect, too: some of the surplus dealers have a bad attitude toward walk-ins. They know you're not likely a moneymaker, so they are apt to blow off simple questions like "got any more of these?" I got this from the guys at Sharon Industries in San Jose one day a few months ago -- I had wandered in to pick up one or two dinky Unisys PCs that I had seen there and thought would make nice little routers if configured with a small hard disk. The place was messier than usual -- maybe they were reorganizing or maybe they were trying to look like Mike Quinn's, I dunno; they certainly hadn't bothered to close the door or hang a sign up ("closed for remodeling"?). The display was still out, though, so I inquired. First he was asking me if I wanted them today, and when I said "yeah, I could take one or two today" (thinking I should leave the door open for him to say "I can't get to them right now, how about tomorrow?") he changed his tune to "oh, I sold 'em all to Halted." The thought that crossed my mind was: except the one you keep on the shelf for people to look at, right? I haven't been back -- maybe I am a pain in the hindquarters but I really prefer dealing with folks I think are capable of being honest. Speaking of pains in the hindquarters, there is another surplus dealer (RA Electronics) who just plain got out of the computer business, and the rumor is that this is because they got fed up with people coming back asking for support for whatever PC junk they had purchased there. So I'm sure that there are some pains worse than I out there -- I at least am working from the assumption that I am buying someone else's junk as-is. -Frank McConnell