DECtape madness

[Mark J. Blair]

> On Jan 13, 2018, at 08:52, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> So, where were all these people when I was trying to clean out
> my old house a couple years ago?  I threw out piles of tapes of
> various formats because I couldn't find anyone to take them for
> postage.

I'm sorry that I missed that event, Bill! I'd be happy to add a DECtape drive and a handful of usable DECtapes to my PDP-8/M project, but I don't want that dearly enough to pay the going eBay prices for that kind of gear at this time. Not that I can really complain, as I'm fortunate to have lots of other cool stuff running the range from free gifts to expensive purchases; I just haven't been at the right node of place + time + checking account balance to have acquired DECtape family gear yet, and I was born just a bit too late to have experienced it in college or the workplace.

I sure wish that I would have anticipated that I'd become interested in retrocomputing in the 201x decade, so I wouldn't have gotten rid of a few specific items over the years that I now wish I still had, and I could have kept my eyes open for other items that I might have acquired cheap or free at the moment that interest in them was at a minimum.

Naturally, there's plenty of stuff in recent years that I have considered to be uninteresting junk to be discarded. I wonder if I'll regret having junked it in another decade or three, or if my sense of nostalgia will remain rooted to my younger years and earlier?