Marvin <marvin_at_rain.org> wrote:
] More interesting stuff from ebay.
]
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=43065424
Beware; in the past this guy has offerred "core memory planes" for
sale several times, even on this list. But if you had read the
fine print you would have found that there were no cores - just
the rectangular PC-board "frame" in which the cores used to reside.
I suppose you could call that a plane, but it isn't what most
compu-geeks would think when hearing the word in that context.
In this case, he includes some text from an "actual" customer
ranting about how cool his core memory board is, describing at
length the 1024 core bits and yada yada yada, but if you read
the all the way to the end you'll find that what he's actually
offerring are the controller cards - not the 1K bit planes that
he describes in such detail. Classic bait-and-switch.
In fact, even when he was earlier selling the core memory boards,
they didn't have the cores, so this rant is obviously marketing
delirium. Nothing that is an outright lie, but misleading as Hell,
unless somebody actually things a PC board frame with no components
is awesomely cool and "looks great under a microscope". Tell me
that isn't engineered to fool people into thinking they're getting
real core memory. Sheesh! And "whatever was last written (back
in the 50s) on the planes I bought is still there" - nope, not
"there" as in "on the planes I bought", but "there" as in "wherever
those cores happen to be now".
As far as I'm concerned, this guy is a rip-off artist. If he
was simply selling Univac memory controller boards, I'd be more
than half interested. And oddly enough, as near as I can tell,
these controller boards actually *do* have some core bits left
on them. (Are "windings" the same as cores, or is this another
aspect of his marketing ingenuity?) So in that sense they may
be more interesting than his former offerings.
Anyway, seeing how far he'll go to be misleading, I don't trust
him. I get the feeling that if I read enough fine print, I'd find
that he's actually just selling pictures of those things, or
pictures of something else that had once been in the same room
with those things, or...
It's really a shame that something like a Univac memory unit would
end up in the hands of somebody like this, who would hack it to
bits and then try to sell the broken fragments by being so misleading.
Sadly,
Bill.
PS. I suppose it is possible that he once sold an actual core plane
with cores in it, and that's what this testimonial is describing.
But the first time I saw that ad of his, I rushed over to his web
page and found him offerring "coreless" memory planes. And even
then he was ranting and raving about how cool cores were, in the
same way he does here, only mentioning at the end that these boards
don't actually have any core. So again, there might not be any
outright lies in any of this, but be sure to read *ALL* of the fine
print before you consider dealing with this guy.
Received on Thu Nov 19 1998 - 21:51:43 GMT