Taking control of your collection

From: James L. Rice <jrice_at_texoma.net>
Date: Tue Feb 5 14:44:27 2002

All kidding aside, I decided to concentrate on my NeXT cubes and slabs,
a BeBox, a couple of Sparcs, an Indy, a few Mac's, one Tandy 1000SX (my
first clone), my new in box IBM PC (64k cassette port) and a Commodore
128D for running CP/M. I've shed all 286, 386 and 486 systems and parts
except for a select few motherboards that are dedicated conrollers for
robots, cnc equipment and similar projects. I've even shed most Pentium
1 systems. I no longer hold on to old hard drives, boards, monitors and
modems that don't work. If it doesen't work, I chunk it. I don't
really enjoy board level trouble shooting and repair, I'd rather swap a
part and move on, no disrespect to Tony; his knowledge of component
level repair leaves me in awe.

I recently got rid of all but one lot of Apple II's, Tandy Model 100's
and 1000's, all of my Amiga's, all of my Commodore 64 stuff (inherited
by my dad, who still uses his 64's on a daily basis) and most of my 68k
Mac's. Most of the stuff was unloaded on ebay for at least what I paid
for it. Anything that didn't sell and that someone didn't want to pick
up got dumpstered or recycled. I looked around one day and decided that
I really didn't need 15 Apple II's, 12 Tandy CM-11 monitors, etc. If
it's not connected to my network and really useful, out it goes.

James

John Foust wrote:

> At 12:00 AM 2/5/2002 -0600, Lawrence Walker wrote:
>
>>I have a connundrum. I want to thin out my collection of computer artifacts
>>and I'm having problems on what to part with.
>>
>
> I see plenty of pathological behavior on this list, and I see it
> when I look in the mirror, or at least when I look in the basement
> of my office building. It is possible to leave the realm of
> the reasonable. Your life can be viewed as unbalanced.
>
> This packrat pathology reminds me of the behavior of old
> folks who lived through the Depression. Do you really need
> fourteen boxes of crackers? It's like shopping obsessions,
> where people buy things and never use them, and buy the same
> things over and over.
>
> I've gone through a few purges, but I'm due for another. In the
> last purge, I tossed the all-too-common varieties of PC, everything
> 386 or below, and even most of the 486s. I decided they'd never
> be rare or useful, and that I could always find another if I needed one.
>
> Giving away stuff is always problematic. It takes a lot of
> time to adequately describe items, and then there's packing
> and shipping, or even the hours spent on local pickup.
>
> For the receiver, there's no doubt a limit on what they'll
> pay to get something. Who wants 100 pounds of old magazines
> from the computer graphics market? Chances are slim I'd find
> someone near me who'd want them, and they're not worth shipping.
>
> - John
>
>
> .
>
>
Received on Tue Feb 05 2002 - 14:44:27 GMT