A Great Find & A Defense of E-Bay

From: Dave McGuire <mcguire_at_neurotica.com>
Date: Fri Jun 16 13:49:27 2000

On June 16, Charles P. Hobbs (SoCalTip) wrote:
> Not to mention, only so many people who would know what to *do* with
> an old Commodore, VAX, TI 99, etc. As far as the rest of the world is
> concerned, it's "trash"....

  Only our broken, brain-damaged society can take a thing that does
it's job just as well as when it was new, and call it "trash" simply
because something newer (not necessarily "better") has been
announced by the vendors. Fascinating...and disturbing.

  My primary car is a '95. It continued to run just fine when the '96
came out. There's a clue in there somewhere.

> Well, not nearly as much as they used to, but one can always hold out
> hope. Know of any new people entering this hobby? Not just squirrelling
> away stuff, or churning it on the auction sites, but actually buying old
> computers, plugging them in, and actually working/playing with them?

  I've turned a few younger people on to it...they seem to get a kick
out of computers whose internals they can really understand. One
can find databooks for 7400-series TTL logic anywhere, and figure
out exactly how a pdp8/e works. Pop open a current PeeCee and what
do you find? Five or six two-zillion-pin chips with names like
"Win-<whatever>" on them that you'll never find so much as a pinout
for in any printed or .pdf literature.


         -Dave McGuire
Received on Fri Jun 16 2000 - 13:49:27 BST