AppleSauce wrote on 2024-04-11, 23:55:

Here in Melbourne you used to be able to , […]
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Here in Melbourne you used to be able to ,

people threw out amiga 500s and 1084 crts , 486 VLB motherboards, sony trinitron G420 crts, sound blaster 16s and even copies of 5.25 floppy sierra games like police quest 2.

But that's all dried up , occasionally a pentium 4 or 3 something shows up but its mostly 2010 to 2014 systems now.

Though classifieds can sometimes yield intresting deals.

Are you on ocau?

gerry wrote on 2024-04-12, 08:11:

Unknown_K summarised it pretty well […]
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Unknown_K summarised it pretty well

As e-waste facilities grew and general recycling became more prevalent there was also a growth in online selling. the result is that the stuff for free is becoming an ever smaller proportion of the total stuff being discarded, being squeezed out.

the flow of things to e-waste is enormous but it seems very rare for people to be able to rescue any of it, a lot of the time it seems very much a 'closed shop'

meanwhile things from the 32bit era are becoming more and more rare, inevitably, and so are less likely to show up anywhere as time goes by (except ebay where there always seems to be something, if willing to pay more for it)

maybe i should get a job at an ewaste to try and salvage parts, hopfully i wouldnt get fired.

Almost nothing. Recycle centers are still the best bet, where you might find something rather than nothing at all, or a dark yellow CRT for $200 on Facebook Marketplace.

stealthjoe wrote on 2024-04-13, 19:40:

In India the situation is worse than anywhere else. Retro computing is virtually unheard of. I am yet to find someone who has re […]
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In India the situation is worse than anywhere else. Retro computing is virtually unheard of. I am yet to find someone who has retrocomputing interest. It is extremely hard to even find a decent s478 board. Being a heavily populated nation with little space, most homes dispose off the older PCs and the same are lost forever in some recycling centers.
Recently after much struggle managed to find and visit a PC dealer who said to have older boards. He even claimed earlier to possess P3/ISA boards which I instantly sensed as bollocks.
When I visited the place all I saw was a few racks of boards (mostly core2duo boards and very few 775s). With some digging was able to find one k8m800 board. Also wanted to get a s478 board but that was not booting up.

Managed to source some retro parts earlier from a far away city, but the prices were on par with ebay if not worse. Got few parts from there as have to deal with the nasty Indian customs while importing.

funny you say that because i have a friend from india who is very much into retro computing, he goes to my school in canada though.

johnvosh wrote on 2024-04-14, 22:10:

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-11, 19:05:

i live in central canada and since everyone here upgrades so fast and throws the rest to ewastes, it makes it particullarily hard to find good stuff, sometimes i will get lucky and get something for free from a friend or family member but generally speaking nothing ever comes up in the wild at thrift stores nor garage sales. odd post on facebook market place or kijiji for retro parts but there is abit of luck involved. i have a friend who has access to an ewaste through a local university and the things he finds is insane.

I live in the Edmonton area as well and feel ya. I check out FB Marketplace and don't find much on there anymore, and when I do, it is over priced. I have had a bit of luck looking at Value Village sometimes, found a bunch of sealed CD-R's, a MS Internet Keyboard, 4 IDE CD Burners recently, but generally they don't have anything. I really wish you could go to the local eco-stations, like we have in Stony Plain and Spruce Grove and grab stuff that people get rid of, but nope, that is illegal.

i live in edmonton too and the computer scene can be absolutely brutal. i recently sold a pci voodoo 3 2000 card that i wasnt using and i wasnt very surprised when it sold the day after i posted the add.

I would have thunk that Edmonton was about the best place to be in Alberta for any scene. I thought there were a couple of large surplus dealers out there that can have interesting stuff, and half a dozen times I've had eBay stuff from out there.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-04-18, 17:44:

I would have thunk that Edmonton was about the best place to be in Alberta for any scene. I thought there were a couple of large surplus dealers out there that can have interesting stuff, and half a dozen times I've had eBay stuff from out there.

I think this is a case where the grass is greener on the other side. I live in Calgary, and despite setting my search settings to Calgary, Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji give me adds from Edmonton. I assume they do this to make it seem like the ads are getting more views than they are getting locally. I've seen a number of great deals pop up on those sites, especially for older hardware that is rarely posted here, such as Tandy 1000s. That gave me the impression that Edmonton has a better retro computing scene. Kijiji is really bad for recommending ads that are nowhere near me. I get a lot of great deals on my frontpage, but they usually end up being in Ontario. Even if the seller would be willing to ship it, Canada Post is prohibitively expensive for anything the size of a computer.

As others have mentioned, the UK scene still seems reasonable for supply though 'silly money' prices being asked likely continue to be a downer for most. Was never much of an ebayer though with most of mine done through trades /contacts.

However, tbh, I've consciously gotten nothing in the last 18 months since my health took a serious downturn and as that's not likely to improve now I'm already moving most things out the same way.

Things used to be super cheap until late into the pandemic in Turkey but prices of anything pre Penitum 4 has skyrocketed to levels I mostly do not bother with unless it is particularly special to me.

My job is moving me back east to Ontario this summer, and I'm already checking out Kijiji and such and I'm seeing that while there isn't tons of stuff, there's at least some some stuff as opposed to the total vacuum I'm living in currently. And since I won't be living on an island, I have the option of actually driving and picking things up without paying more in postage than the things are worth, yay!! 😁😁

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-04-18, 18:29:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-04-18, 17:44:

I would have thunk that Edmonton was about the best place to be in Alberta for any scene. I thought there were a couple of large surplus dealers out there that can have interesting stuff, and half a dozen times I've had eBay stuff from out there.

I think this is a case where the grass is greener on the other side. I live in Calgary, and despite setting my search settings to Calgary, Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji give me adds from Edmonton. I assume they do this to make it seem like the ads are getting more views than they are getting locally. I've seen a number of great deals pop up on those sites, especially for older hardware that is rarely posted here, such as Tandy 1000s. That gave me the impression that Edmonton has a better retro computing scene. Kijiji is really bad for recommending ads that are nowhere near me. I get a lot of great deals on my frontpage, but they usually end up being in Ontario. Even if the seller would be willing to ship it, Canada Post is prohibitively expensive for anything the size of a computer.

Thats odd because for me its the other way around. most adds I come across that catch my interest are either calgary or saskatoon and because of this, ive always thought that calgary's scene was better. weird how that works. sometimes i wish calgary and edmonton were closer together so we could have the best of both worlds. maybe if they get that super fast train built i hear it could decrease travel times to 30 mins from city to city, although tickets wouldnt be cheap.

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-21, 06:56:

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2024-04-18, 18:29:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-04-18, 17:44:

I would have thunk that Edmonton was about the best place to be in Alberta for any scene. I thought there were a couple of large surplus dealers out there that can have interesting stuff, and half a dozen times I've had eBay stuff from out there.

I think this is a case where the grass is greener on the other side. I live in Calgary, and despite setting my search settings to Calgary, Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji give me adds from Edmonton. I assume they do this to make it seem like the ads are getting more views than they are getting locally. I've seen a number of great deals pop up on those sites, especially for older hardware that is rarely posted here, such as Tandy 1000s. That gave me the impression that Edmonton has a better retro computing scene. Kijiji is really bad for recommending ads that are nowhere near me. I get a lot of great deals on my frontpage, but they usually end up being in Ontario. Even if the seller would be willing to ship it, Canada Post is prohibitively expensive for anything the size of a computer.

Thats odd because for me its the other way around. most adds I come across that catch my interest are either calgary or saskatoon and because of this, ive always thought that calgary's scene was better. weird how that works. sometimes i wish calgary and edmonton were closer together so we could have the best of both worlds. maybe if they get that super fast train built i hear it could decrease travel times to 30 mins from city to city, although tickets wouldnt be cheap.

There's one guy in Calgary who has a lot of good stuff like classic IBMs from the 80s, but it's all out of my price range. We also have a recycler that gets the occasional vintage PC. Sometimes you can scoop something from them for cheap on eBay, but a lot of it is untested. There are a couple of others who occasionally post stuff on Marketplace, but I haven't noticed anything from them in a little while.

I agree about the distance. We're a bit too far apart to go for a drive to check something out. For me it's not worth the time or gas money. Another downside in Canada is that our postal system is a lot worse than the American one. It's both slower and more expensive. That rules out most eBay deals that I find.

I love when came home like this...

thank good i like to open trash cans and check...

Only thing I found in the last few weeks was an unopened/sealed Belkin F5D5005 v2.000 PCI network card for $4 at a goodwill. They go for about $15 on ebay.

cloverskull wrote on 2024-04-13, 16:31:

I'm in Southern California. Orange County to be more precise. I've only ever looked on eBay and Craigslist. Is there anyone from the area with advice on better places to look?

offerup can be worth a look in some areas. It was looking promising in Canada here until it got bought/merged and they killed Canadian operations. Be aware that general search terms and eyeball work better than being too specific.

I used to live in Edmonton from 2009-2014, and my impression is that government surplus occasionally has some good stuff, but it's usually not "old" enough.
I used to do an internship at Alberta Computers for Schools, and I would occasionally see old machines like 486 laptops, but unless an employee went to take them out of the recycling bin, they were just recycled.
There's a "calgarycomputerwholesale" on ebay that seems to have some good stuff occasionally.

Vancouver is a bit better, FreeGeek used to be the cheapest place but they closed now, Hackery has a lot of stuff but it's a bit more expensive, and the Computie on Marine Drive is expensive on ebay but you can bargain with them just like any other Chinese operated shop.

========The Pacific Ocean========

China is a very different story, as shipping is extremely cheap so most deals are done online, prices are greatly distorted by antique speculators/collectors, and old imported computers are significantly overpriced, Apple >= Western/Japanese 8/16bit (C64/Atari/Spectrum/MSX/NEC PC-98/Fujitsu FM) >= RISC servers/workstations(except Loongson) >= Western/Japanese PC compatible > domestic Chinese brands.

In the 2000s, China used to be a gathering place for overseas e-waste, with electronics recyclers from developed countries shipping their computer scraps as material for recycling. This created an extremely cheap market for electronic parts in China, and UV erasable EPROMs are still common and cheap, as the Book8088 designer showed me, with so many vintage chips that you could build a house. In a sense, those computers sent for recycling become Book8088/Hand386/Pocket 386 etc and trained the electronic engineers behind.

But the most unfortunate thing is that due to the general lack of knowledge about western 8/16bit computers among Chinese enthusiasts, most of the C64/Atari/Amiga/Spectrum and other computers that came into China in the 2000s were disassembled, and it wasn't improve until I started to write a column on Zhihu to introduce more information about western 8bit computers to the Chinese readers.

======Tidbits of information=======

I heard from the owner of Computie that China is no longer accepting e-waste, and Malaysia is taking over from China. I'm not sure if this is true, but I guess I should plan a trip to Malaysia.