Re: Some thoughts on collecting

[Scarletdown <SecretaryBird@SoftHome.net>]

On Mon, 11 Nov 2002 16:18:36 GMT, Louis Cornelio <clairmnt@n2.net>
wrote:

>In article 
><67uz9.44455$MGm1.41292@news02.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com>, "Tim 
>Haynes" <timhaynes@alumni.NO.SPAM.PLEASE.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>
>> I think I'm going to cry...
>> 
>
>I have seen worse - equzl piles, but sitting in storage facility parking 
>lots - in the rain......
>I cracked about dozen IIGS & came up w/ 4 4 meg ramcards & out of 2 
>dozen IIes found a Transwarp & a few AE ramcards.... always nice to find 
>a surprise!

My best rescue happened early October.  One of the officers in my
squadron (Air National Guard) was getting ready for a move
cross-country to Florida, and on that drill weekend, he brought in a
massive amount of old computer equipment and left it in the dining
hall for anyone who wanted it to take home.  I went home with a
Cromemco System Two (1MB RAM, dual 5.25" floppies, 21MB hard drive,
dual Z-80/68000 CPU), a bare Cromemco System Three (dual 8 inch
floppies, but no cards at all inside), a pile of Cromemco Manuals, a
complete set of Cromix Plus and UNIX System V floppies, three
different Cromemco catalogs (sold 2 of them for $20 each and kept the
third one), about a dozen or so Micro Systems Magazines, a few
miscellaneous S-100 cards, and a pair of Rana Elite One 5.25" disk
drives (Apple Disk ][ compatible).  I sold one of the Rana drives.
Took the buyer a while to pay though (I was guessing that he wasn't
going to pay since the shipping was so high, and I was fully prepared
to keep them both for my IIe.)  But since he did pay, I've decided to
sell off the other one now that I don't have a matching set (the IIe
has a Duodisk anyway).

Had I known better, I would have brought home the other two Cromemco
systems as well.  One was another System Two, and the other was a
System One.  I didn't discover until I got home that Sunday that what
I thought was a power supply of some sort, was actually the hard drive
for the System One.  At least the stuff didn't just get thrown away.
What didn't get claimed went to Re-PC in Seattle.  I put out an
advisory to Seattle area collectors on the Classic Computer mailing
list that I'm on, and hopefully, one or two of them managed to score
the Cromemcos cheaply.

-- Scarletdown