On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 11:01 -0700, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Jules Richardson wrote:
We picked up a van load at the weekend - 19
Horizons (another 3 are on
the way!), 9 Minstrels, a Cromemco (I forget which!), and an imperial
buttload (artistic licence :) of S100 spares.
Good Lord! That's a lot of Horizons!
Yep. The chap who passed away was the first person to import and sell
Horizons in the UK way back when apparently, so he did have a legitimate
reason to have that many (at least at one time! :-)
I think we've already got 5 Horizons, so along with those ones and the
three on the way that'll 27 of the buggers. Quite obviously, we are not
going to be holding on to that many! :)
Shame a few of them have honking great red reset switches mounted in the
front :-(
Never heard of the Minstrel but it looks keen.
It was a Brit S-100 system apparently - nothing particularly fancy about
it though (well, no more so than any S-100 box). Of course there's quite
possibly some interesting boards in this lot, that's before even looking
at all the boxed boards that we picked up at the same time (maybe a
hundred or so)
This was from
a house where the old chap had died recently - to say he
was a bit of a hoarder was an understatement. The house was floor to
ceiling with computers, docs, software, newspapers, books, photos,
videos. Unfortunately the chap's son who was there with us was paranoid
about there being sensitive information buried in everything, so 90% of
the docs and disks had to be left behind - ditto with most of the
components and test gear as he was worried they'd still be on the books
from the guy's old business and he'd be liable if they were released.
Ugh! Luddites!! The bane of computer collectors the world over.
Yep. On the other hand, it's nice that we had a chance to rescue
*anything* I suppose - often this sort of stuff would likely all go to
landfill. I'm hoping we'll get a chance to go back when it's realised
that what's left is all junk (at least as far as these people are
concerned) - there were some useful tools and PCB equipment that'd be
handy for us to have, and one room was so full of junk still that we
didn't have time to do more than skim the surface of it.
cheers
Jules