classics I threw away or sold ... foolishly

[Eric Christopherson]

On Wed, May 18, 2016, Swift Griggs wrote:
> 
> I've stack-ranked all the classic items that I, to my everlasting shame, 
> let go of at some point and now I feel like it was a mistake:

I guess I don't have too much to regret yet. The things I regret getting
rid of:
1. My family's first Commodore PET 8032, back in 1988 or so. Strangely I
miss the books more than the system, though, perhaps because I have
another system like it now. It was great to see one of the books I
missed most from that set a few years ago at a friend's house; I gave
him $5 for it. It was available on Bombjack, but I had no idea what it
was called or how to find it. Anyway, the 8032 thrown on the curb was
working except for some keyboard keys, and had a nice LQ daisywheel
printer and an 8050 dual floppy drive. Both worked AFAIK, except that
one time I apparently sent a control code to the printer that switched
it to real ASCII, and I could never get it back to PETSCII even with a
power cycle. My new 8032 worked perfectly, including the keys, in the
late 1990s when I got it, but has stopped powering on now.
2. My NES and SNES with a fairly good number of games, plus a Super
Advantage. I don't know what specific revisions the consoles were, but
they didn't look like the later redesigns. I reasoned that emulating
games was not only good enough but better, because I could pause,
rewind, and fast-forward them.
3. My first Intel PC, a GHC EasyData 486SX/25. If I had known EasyData
was so uncommon I probably would have kept it. It was no speed demon,
even after I put the OverDrive and 24 MB (I think it was) in it, but it
was a big step up from 8-bits.
4. Various systems I got to see only a few times at my dad's work, when
they liquidated the company a few years after he died. I was interested
in the Sun workstations and to a lesser extent the Harris mini (not sure
what kind). But I would have been even less equipped to deal with them
(especially the big metal) than I am now.

-- 
        Eric Christopherson