computer fest madness

I DREAM for a b+w!! I have always wanted one (working or not working) just to say i had one. Still want one. hint hint!

Oli

* faints *

I knew I overpaid when I laid out $60 for my B&W. ;^b

--Peace

I fully understand your posting.

I know I'd burst a vein not being able to tell anyone about a haul like that.

Well done, old chap.

^{Now if you're looking to unload one of those B&Ws on the cheap.....};)

Wanna hook me up with one of those B&Ws? ;-)

I second that

I'll just be leaving now, and taking this Sawtooth with me... *shoves it under his shirt* MwAh!

Shoot... and to think that the cheapest ones I saw were about $125 stripped.

Sigh...

I was at that show. Didn't see the G3's you got such a bargain on, though (obviously ).

I ended up with a LaserWriter 12/640 PS (finally, an ethernet laser printer!), a Motorola Tanzania clone (stripped, for $1), a huge stack of books (mostly O'Reilly), and a Convergent Technologies Unix box.

The Unix box is really neat. AT&T Unix System V, and compatible with the AT&T's Unix PCs. Best of all, it has onboard ethernet.

Ooh Ooooh! Eeun's digging up an old thread! Curse that handsome devil!

The reason for doing so, is I've got a B&W in the mail, and wanted to know if you've made any further moves towards a bare-metal G3.

^{grumble...grumble...re-reads how much dankephoto paid for that pile of computers...}

I was at the show too but made the mistake of waiting until sunday to go. Drove several hours to see a basicly empty lot! Guess the $20 B&W's were all gone but I picked up an old 68K for $5 for some parts just to accomplish something on the trip.

Decided to have a look inside even though I figured it was all PC. I probably haven't been to a compter show for 8 years, and the last one was one of those pitiful things held in a hotel ballroom - sorta had a suspicion that it was one company running all the booths and the "show" was just to give the appearance of competition and lower prices. Anyway Trenton wasn't that bad, but it was still sad to see. Almost half the room was those dispicable companies selling copies of knock-off's of knock-off's of copies and other general low quality crap. I look at those things and my blood boils at the thought of all the wasted materials and enery that went into making a piece of sh*t that will be hauled around the country until some smuck buys it, breaks it and tosses it out! I'll hunt around through salvage/surplus warehouses for hours looking at what other people call junk, but even a 2 hour drive and a $10 ticket can't convince me to spend much time browsing that crap. I particularly enjoyed how the major el crapo supplier didn't want you using its plastic bags for other items.

Low grade crap of any type just irritates me. And I miss the times when there was actually something to these shows. The first one I ever went to would have been around 1990 in Timonium, MD. I was 14 and an adult friend of the family who was into Macs took me. It was HUGE! And all kinds of stuff! I was still on the PC side of things then - probably on my first PC actually, an XT clone. Then like now, I preferred to buy more (or more interesting) slightly older tech stuff than one or two brand new toys. Plus some of the ridiculous proprietary systems of our family PC kept me from enjoying all those colorful EGA and VGA games for a long time. $75 of "hard-saved" (some of it hard-earned) money bought me more than I could easily carry and kept me busy for the next year. I went back to the same show a few more times and it was never as great as the first trip but I always wound up with some deals and had fun. And I always got some exercise running (ok walking as fast as I could without looking like I was deranged) around the show 6 times to make sure I got the best deal on that video card or new hard drive!

The last big show I remember was either the Trenton one or something in Cherry Hill, NJ. I remember it was raining. I don't know if some of the vendors were relocated indoors or not, but the place was packed. You could barely move but it was still a great show. We had been considering a new computer for at least 6 months. That meant at least 6 months of digging through the Computer Shopper (did you Mac guys use that too?) and pricing systems - and explaining to my dad what it all meant. Oh there were checklists and tables and lots of photocopying and red ink! He sorta enjoyed it because it was like buying a car back when options were a bit more optional. The budget didn't totally go out the window, but we did spend a bit more than intended at that show - we weren't even planning to buy that day. The prices were decent enough that we could get a 386DX instead of an SX! You know I'm not even sure what that means anymore - I think the SX lacked a math coprocessor - but it was great at the time! But the big deal was when Dad shelled out $600 for a 15" NEC 3FG monitor!!! We'd lived with that ugly cyan and magenta CGA for a long time and now millions of colors! And a 15" screen! WOW! Then I had to guard the CPU while Dad carried the huge monitor box out to the car. He exited the hall through an open emergency exit...and nearly dropped the box when he started to slip on some wet metal stairs! But everything and everyone made it home safe and sound, though the return trip included the mandatory speeding ticket. Dad didn't go along with me to many of the shows, but he did attend at least three and after every one there was a speeding ticket about half way home.

Ok that's about enough for now. I still have stuff I bought at that very first computer show. It turned up a few weeks ago. That old Hayes 300bps external modem I bought for $1 because I liked the aluminun casing might finally find a use....if I can fit a hard drive in there.

Hope you enjoyed my rambling stories, or just skipped over this entirely

Tom

Woo hoo for surplus warehouses and climbing the junk piles! Many times I've climbed over pallets of PC stuff just to nab that Adesso Truform or get close enough to identify that HP PA/RISC workstation. As a matter of fact I'm off to do just that sorta thing in a little bit today. I need an SCA SCSI drive for my new Sun SS5, and maybe I'll get lucky and find some more cool Mac stuff. It's too bad the good Mac laptops go fast and the CCs go the fastest...

EDIT:

Back. Turns out the big boss at S.E. made a fuss over the mess of stuff in the Recycling Center (where the older stuff gets sent to be dismantled for scrap) The entire second floor was cleaned out and reduced to about 6 palettes of stuff remaining. Luckily one of the Mac volunteers was there when I got there, so he pulled a NewerTech G3 MAXpower 240/160 for NuBus PMacs, *with* the PDS video card adapter and bracket out of a 7100 and handed it to me before the rest of it went on one of the "scrap" palettes. I also got a PB 520c, banged up functional, 250? MB/12 MB has 8.0 but I'm currenly brining that down to 7.6 'cause the low RAM.

I'm really glad I went in last week and got all those Toshiba Satellite lappys, 'cause they had all been stacked up on the 2nd floor. Now I gotta go back in on Tues. with a bit of cash and hope they still have some of those HP servers with 4-6 9GB SCA drives in them for $20...

i'vee always got the kid in a candy store thing going on around old stuff. Whether i'm looking in a dumpster, or at a flea market, or at a surplus industrial place, which is my favorite place to go, mostly because i can find pallets of anything. The last time I went, i found a pallet of MT G3s and 9600s for $600. Shame I didn't have the space, or the method of transportation to get them home. There was some serious hack potential there.

eeun wrote:
>The reason for doing so, is I’ve got a B&W in the mail, and wanted to know
>if you’ve made any further moves towards a bare-metal G3.

I did complete a bare B+W, my nephew has it now. I took some pics with my digicam but damn if I can find the dang things. They're hiding no doubt amongst a bunch of files labeled DSC0023.jpg and similar. I'll post 'em though when I find 'em.

It came out looking pretty nifty. I added a second optical drive, not tough, just cut out the front and fabbed a bracket to hold them both. The face, which just covers the area below the optical drives, I made from a hot-air-gun-stripped PCB, cut to size with holes for the power, reset and interupt buttons.

The side latch now uses the locking bar, but with the spring reversed to hold the door latched.

I made a handle of stainless steel tubing, fits at the handle attachment points. I meant to make a second handle, but didn't get to it before the nephew took it away.

Dan K