Hi,
Oh, yes. Very strange indeed. I smell something, and it's not coming from the horse barn, either.
Hey! I see some guy on eBay selling, or trying to sell, IBM 5100 and 5110 series pre-PC PC's for around $5-6k each.
I wonder if I *really* need to keep a machine hanging around that reads/writes punch cards, paper tape, 8" diskettes and 1/4" mag tape?? I'll have to see how much interest there is once this guy runs out of his.....
I wonder if I should sell any of the applications on 1/4" tape I still have for the fool things? Not that they're useful things like word processors and spreadsheets, though. No, the 5100/5110 were built as lab data collection and processing machines. However, if anyone would like to attach thermocouples to a large number of IC's in a life-test oven, say, I have data collection and analysis programs for the things!
Of course, by 1984, we'd junked all the 5100 and 5110 machines and moved to 5150 and 5160 PC's and XT's to do the same jobs. Plus, the 'new' machines were half the size, a tenth the weight, had 10x the processing power *and* would run canned apps like word processors and spreadsheets!
I was rummaging about in the boxes on the shelves a week or so ago (for something else) and came across a box with an Apple Lisa in it - in pieces. But, it's all there. I think. Someone didn't get it fixed 20 years ago and I wound up with it and promptly didn't fix it, either!
I also came across two Atari 800 machines in their original shipping boxes. They're not worth much on eBay, around $200 max, but one has the game developer's ROM on the graphics card. This gave ctrl key assignment to basic sprites and spridgets to each key on the keyboard. It has the stickers on the faces of all the keys still, which is what gave it away. They were used with a game development program to WYSIWYG in the graphic elements to make up a game for each playing screen you wanted in the game.
I know that was like $500 in 1982 or so, and I have the software that goes with it and the compiler as well. Anyone want to write Atari games???
The other 800 is a stock one without the fancy ROM chip. I wonder what the fancy one might bring with a good description? I might have to give this one a try on eBay and see if anyone wants an old Atari they can use to write new Atari games with......
Speaking of which, I sold my Apple III for just over $800 two weeks ago. I wonder if I can get a similar price for a fancied-up Atari 800?
If nothing else, these strange auctions have got me to digging and putting ancient stuff up on the block to see what I can get for it. Oh, and I bought a few spare IBM Thinkpad X31's with the Apple III money.
That's my favorite machine these days. Not the most modern of notebooks, but it gives 1.6-2.0 GHz P4M power with 2 GB of RAM and a 1024x768 display. It's small and light but is still a decent size to work with - not one of those too small or too large things they're selling these days. I love the things, and they sell for around $150! They're very useful running XP and much better than some old 6502 or less thing that couldn't process a DCS 100 image if you gave it a week to do so!
I dedicated one x31 for photo processing the old Kodak images. I scored a dock, too, so I now use three antique IBM 9516 20" 1280x1024 LCD displays with it ( I already had those, yet another older IBM thing I scarf up whenever I can). I have a two-display analog card in the dock and the third is driven from the controller in the X31. The nicest part is that when one wants a machine to take into the field, just pop it off the dock and you're ready to go with 100 GB of inboard storage for photos, and can get by with a single display on the machine itself. Sweet!
And all for a single Apple-III that needs new foam bits in the keyboard. That was the big issue with the early Apples - bad keyboards over time. Oh, well, enough of the Sanford & Son Computer Company!
Later!
Stan