collectin depression was:Re: A Tragedy Averted

From: Sam Ismail <dastar_at_crl.com>
Date: Wed May 21 23:05:16 1997

On Wed, 21 May 1997, Paul E Coad wrote:

> On Wed, 21 May 1997, Glenn Roberts wrote:
>
> > congrats! i must say that reading this list is starting to get a bit
> > depressing. one begins to feel that if you're not routinely finding
> > treasures in the trash or S100 systems for $2 you're just not with it. i
> > guess patience will ultimately win out though. keep searching for those
> > treasures!
>
> The people on this list also understand why you are excited when you have
> a good outing. Keep looking. You'll have your chances to make us drool.
> We'll be here when you find an unused PDP-8 in a dumpster behind your
> building.

I suggest trying all the thrift shops within a 25-30 miles radius of
your house. The thrift shops in my town have yieled one IBM PC manual,
and that's it. Very frustrating. Then the other day while travelling
through a city over the hill I decided to try a couple thrift shops
there. So I found some in the yellow pages and made a visit. It was
well worth it. I picked up a TRS-80 CoCo2 for $.99 (yes, ninety-nine
cents) and an Atari 800XL with a 1050 drive for anoter $3.98. Plus some
other miscellany. The other thrift shop yielded about 3 C64's, 2
commodore disk drives, an intellivision, an Atari 5200, 2 Atari 2600s, 2
Odyssey2's, a TI-99/4a and some sundry carthridges for all the
above...total bill was $32. I managed to talk the proprietor down from
the $10.99 to $45.99 they were asking for each unit to $5 each, and then
I got a 50% discount on top of that. That's another suggestion...learn
to bargain. It's always in your best interest to bargain. Figure it
this way: it's probably something you're not going to walk away from
anyway (especially if it's like an Osbourne 1 or something) and you may
as well get at least a couple bucks knocked off of it.

Sam
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Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass
Received on Wed May 21 1997 - 23:05:16 BST