A Great Find & A Defense of E-Bay

From: Charles P. Hobbs <transit_at_lerctr.org>
Date: Fri Jun 16 16:14:26 2000

On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Dave McGuire wrote:

> 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.
>
I'm sure that if you did a web search, you'd find thousands of essays
deploring our "consumerist, throw-away society". I won't write one here.

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

Big difference, though. A car is a car is a car. As long as it keeps
running well and doesn't cost too much to fix, keep it. I never understood
the mentality saying you gotta have a new car every year, or whatever.

I *do* know there is a big difference between my Apple II (which still
does yeoman service running my Syntauri synthesizer) and the
PowerComputing PowerCenter 240 that I do most of my "real work" on. And,
no, I'm not going back to the Apple II and a dot-matrix printer to do my
newsletters on, or surf the Net.

So as far as the non-computer-collecting community is concerned (how's
that for alliteration, huh?), things have improved exponentially since the
early days of the Imsai, the Apple or even the original IBM-PC. There's no
real reason for them to store, let alone maintain the older
equipment....and, unless one of us geeks hears about it, and is in a
position to "rescue" said equipment...off to the landfill/scrapper/China
it goes...
Received on Fri Jun 16 2000 - 16:14:26 BST