Yeah ... the only time I owned a piece of DEC gear was when I bought a VAX of
some sort (780?) that was in a dual-wide ~60" high rack, but was only
interested, really, in the rack hardware. It had a CPU, disk controllers, a
number of I/O boards, but no disks or memory. I ended up hauling if off for
$25. The seller's guys even helped me put it into the truck and tie it down.
I'm quite sure that if I'd expressed any interest in the CPU and other stuff,
even in the PSU (I think that's what that heavy part with all the fans was)
I'd have had to pay quite a bit more. His attitude was that if I didn't take
it all, he'd have to charge me more.
I eventually decided I couldn't use the racks after all, but, having put them,
at great pain, in the basement, I required the guy who bought the "guts" from
me to take the racks with him, which didn't seem to bother him at all.
Now, this was back in '84 or so, when DEC stuff was still of some interest,
commercially, but I suspect that if one seems interested in the sheet metal,
the electronics don't mean as much to an auction house trying to clear a
building. I've bought brand new spares of Mutlibus boards normally costing
$5k or so for $10 when I asked whether the cables or the manuals were
available separately. Likewise, I've ended up with powered disk drive boxes
with perfectly good drives on board, when all I said I was after was the
attached cable. You have to guess at what the seller's attitude is, but it
often works out that he'll take a mere pittance for the whole thing if you
express an interest in a part that's difficult to extract.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ethan Dicks" <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2002 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: How much?
>
> --- Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com> wrote:
> > If they only charge $15K for it, you'd better hang onto your wallet,
> > because
> > they'll probably want an extra $10K just to handle it unless they've
> > already
> > got a buyer lined up and willing to pay $25K.
> >
> > Dick
>
> That's my experience... a reseller will offer you 30% of his sale
> price for cool stuff, 25% for not-so-cool stuff.
>
> That's how I got the MV2000 plus outboard RD54 plus terminals for a few
> hundred bucks 8+ years ago - I paid the end user the same they would have
> gotten for their system, but they didn't have to box and ship it; I drove
> downtown to pick the lot up. Saved them a bundle and got me some cool
> toys. I ended up putting Ultrix 2.0 on it, back when it was tough to get
> a decent UNIX at home.
>
> -ethan
>
>
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Received on Fri Jan 18 2002 - 15:14:50 GMT