Well I had an interesting lunch today. A friend had spotted a message in a thread in the local newsgroup (yes, my city has it's own Usenet newsgroup) about some place full of surplus computers. So today, three of us went to check it out. As I said, it was very interesting.
After we finally found the place (no sign), we went in and asked if we could look around. They said sure. The building is pretty much all warehouse, with some unfinshed office space up front. Most of it was filled with pallets of wrapped monitors. Each pallet was labeled with a 8.5"x11" piece of paper computer printed with big letters (e.g. Working 17" monitors, Non-working 14" monitors). There were also stacks and huge boxes of other stuff. It seems they recycle or resell all this stuff. The guy there said they had a big order of monitors ready to be shipped to Africa (or was it South America?). In the back, we found a huge box full of nothing but pins snipped off capacitors and other electronic components. When I say huge, I mean I tried moving it just to see how heavy it was. I couldn't budge it! The computers appeared to be mostly 486s and such. We saw a fair smattering of various older (pre-Quadra, I think) Mac models, one original PC (or maybe it was an XT, I couldn't tell), an Apple II+, a couple Sun Sparc pieces, and I forget what else. Also, an ancient tape drive that we all agreed would make a great display piece somewhere. (I thought it would make a nice, if small, coffee table. Maybe an end table would have been more appropriate.) There were some partially stripped racks of telco equipment outside. Anyway, to bring this on topic, in the very back, I found some boxes of software. Many slipcased copies of IBM Basic 3.0. I thought I'd finally found something when I saw a box that said Epyx, but it turned out to be some print program (a la Print Shop, which I also found copies of). The best I came up with were some 1983 & 1985 IBM educational titles: Bumble Games, Monster Math, Missing Letters, and Primary Editor. They're all in the nice grayish-beige plastic cases with the manuals, but only BG and PE have the original disks. (The others have copies.) I didn't have any money on me, but asked the guy about them anyway. He said I could have them because they were just going to throw them out. Are these worth anything to anybody? Don't worry, Jim, I'll enter the appropriate ones in MobyGames eventually. I see one or two are already there. I also got a shrinkwrapped copy of MS-DOS 5.0 for free. (There were several.) -- Lee K. Seitz * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * http://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/ Wanted: Vintage Pac-M*n necktie (The asterisk is to keep from mucking up people's Usenet search results. Replace it with an "a", if you didn't know.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent to you because you are currently subscribed to the swcollect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of 'unsubscribe swcollect' Archives are available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
