First post, by Rhuwyn
So, I know there is a separate thread for stuff you bought or stuff you found. But I thought this story was kinda cool and thought it deserved it's own thread. Today I inquired into a somewhat ambigious craigslist ad. It was something to the effect. "Lots of computers and accessories ...20 dollar each..the more the buy the bigger the deal you get". It only had one photo of a couple of towers, printers, a few CRT monitors and some boxes of floppys and other random stuff. One of the towers looked particularly old so I called him.
Turns out this ad was from an older retired couple who was moving to florida. They had saved every computer, computer accessory, manual, piece of software, etc that they had ever bought! Every shoe box I opened revealed some new interesting treasure that I never expected.
There were 6 towers. A Pentium 4 Whitebox, and IBM pentium 3, a Compaq Sempron, a Compaq Athlon XP. and a Dell Dimension Intel Core 2 Duo were the 5 more modern machines. But the most interesting was that old tower. from what I can tell it started life as a 386 and was upgraded to a 486, and then to it's current incarnation to a Socket 7 system and he had all the parts from the times it was upgraded! the old 386 motherboard was there as was the multi I/O card and all the other cards he'd had including some ISA video cards. A couple processors he had upgraded in the 386 before swapping the motherboard. He had all the manuals to every single component as far as I can tell.
Other finds both interesting and uninteresting include......
A Stack of completely never used 5 1/2 floppys
A CH Virtual Pilot Pro with CH Pedals
In box copies for Commander Keen, Mortal Kombat, Bedlam(UNOPENED), NHL Hockey (Unopened), and other games.
Tons of software on 5 1/2 and 3 1/4 floppy I haven't even been able to go through.
Multiple versions of Dos and Windows on Floppys
Every version of Windows on CD From Windows 95 to Windows 7.
A number of speakers and joysticks and gamepads.
3 scanners and 5 printers
He told me over the phone before I went over that someone had offered him 100 bucks for the whole lot but had never showed up. My original intention was to lowball him once I got there but once I got so wrapped up in their story that I didn't have the heart to. It may not have been the most impressive haul ever but I just thought it was interesting that this was basically this guys entire computer history.
