Any interest in "newer" hardware, software?

[Mike Begley]

A lot of the younger collectors are spending ridiculous amounts of money on 486 & Pentium class machines on assorted facebook vintage and retro groups.  I don't get it either, but everyone has their fetishes and I try not to judge.  Parted out you can possibly get a couple hundred bucks out of a machine if you get lucky.

I personally might be interested in an 8" floppy drive, mainly to show my coworkers, some of whom didn't know such things existed.  I'm also vaguely interested in one of the PDP 11/23s, but I know it's already been vetoed by my wife without even asking.  😊  Any VT100-compatible terminals in the stash you'd be willing to part with?

I'm down in Seattle, and occasionally get up that way while camping, but this year you might as well be on the moon.  Maybe we could arrange to meet on the border near Oroville and Osoyoos, and you can throw them across the border.

-mike

-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctalk
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2020 11:36 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Any interest in "newer" hardware, software?

Have been going through my shop and storage room trying to see what can get rid of and wasn't aware of how much old electronics and computers have accumulated over last 50 years.  Should note that this process has been at insistance of my wife as a lot of these boxes just got moved whenever I moved and much of this stuff haven't looked at for decades.

Was about to toss a 1987 box containing DOS 3.3 but then figured someone might want it.  Have a couple of XT systems kicking around somewhere but in 1987 I'd discovered the Mac and considered 68000 processor a far superior architecture as it was an easy transition from someone who'd spent most of their time programming on a PDP-11.  Also have early Mac software, hundreds of 3.5" disks which are primarily taking up space and all of them have been copied to HDD's and now run my Mac code under Basilisk2 was faster than it used to run on my MacIIvx (of which I have a couple).

Also managed to find, in no particular order, a couple of C64's, a TI99, ZX81, VIC20 and an 8" floppy drive with full documentation that I faintly recall buying at a surplus electronics place in Seattle.  Also found a box of old Univac cards which appear to be DTL with individual transistors and then go on to having DTL IC's as well as some old IBM cards.  Used to pull transistors and diodes off these to build my own circuits 50 years ago.  Now, with storage being so ridiculously cheap haven't even come close to making a dent in the capacity of a 256 Gb SD card in my Samsung S8 handheld supercomputer of which I'm using the camera function to create high res images of what I'm going through.

Also have lots of PC motherboards starting with XT's and progressing upwards.  Never liked 80286 and so only collected from 80386 and higher.  Seem to have lots of various parallel port adapters, disk interfaces as well as parallel and serial port boards.  Was planning on using these as dedicated processors for data acquisition but found that technology progressed faster than my getting around to use them and it's a lot simpler to either use Phidget's SBC with various sensors for environmental monitoring or a much less power hungry Parallax Propellar chip for more demanding data acquisition applications.  (Haven't let my wife know how many of newer systems I have stashed away but they take up way less room than old hardware).

Do also have a couple of PDP 11/23 systems which I'll probably have to part with as I haven't used then in last 15 years.  Also have a number of unibus boards which haven't run into yet but won't be using them.  Lots of old computer books as well which would be nice to keep but likely have most of documentation in digital form and usually back up all important pdf files to separate drives.

The PC stuff is most voluminous and, if there's any interest, can post images of what I have on my web site.  Only components I've tested are disk drives of which most work but SCSI drives are all old and a number of them didn't take kindly to be powered off after running for years and being moved from Vancouver to Kamloops.

Boris Gimbarzevsky