MAZter wrote on 2020-08-25, 17:17:

Have you ever had unusual sales / purchases with disproportionately expensive shipping, when the shipping cost was much higher than the item's value?

I often buy things from the USA that would cost a fortune to ship to the UK. I send them to my drop shipper in OR for forwarding using Parcel Monkey, and that reduces my costs enormously. I also act as drop shipper for people if sellers won't ship outside the UK or EU, or if direct shipping is too expensive. I'll never pay extortionate charges for shipping if it can be avoided.

canthearu wrote on 2020-08-25, 16:25:

Woot […]
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Woot

s-l1600 (2).jpg

Finally a 2 meg 64-bit VLB accelerator card for my 486 😀

Now just have to wait 2 months for postage!

Nice! I have the exact same card. Good display quality 👍

imi wrote on 2020-08-23, 13:10:

I like quirky input devices... so I had to get this one ^^ ... and this chonky boi :3 it's fascinating how robust joysticks wher […]
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I like quirky input devices... so I had to get this one ^^
...
and this chonky boi :3
it's fascinating how robust joysticks where built back then, well CH ones especially even though they're still mostly just plastic.
but compared to my modern joysticks that are already falling apart after a few years this is just quality.
hardware39_54.jpg

WOW, that's awesome. Until your post I had never heard of a CH force feedback stick. Now I want one, but not at $200 -- eBay listing. 😳

I've never had a CH stick fail on me.

MAZter wrote on 2020-08-25, 17:17:

Have you ever had unusual sales / purchases with disproportionately expensive shipping, when the shipping cost was much higher than the item's value?

Sent a $20 Dell LCD monitor 14" to a buyer in Peru on Saturday, he paid about $86 for shipping.

Oh yes. I once shipped a $15 item to Russia from the U.S. and the shipping was about three times higher than the item. They must have REALLY needed the item and I hunted for the absolute cheapest shipping method as well.

Today's thing is a late 286 with 640KB of integrated memory and a floppy/serial/parallel controller. I did not expect it to be quite this big but sort of worked it out from how small the ISA port looks on it. See that fan behind it? That's a 140mm fan.
The impressive thing is, for such an old board, it's actually in excellent condition.

It has a whole bunch of factory bodge wires and fixes, but the battery hasn't even corroded a single trace on the board.

Does anyone know what system it might have come from?

that's one big varta... and it hasn't even leaked yet, time to snip ^^

My most recent haul.
Love the vivid colors, I just hate the all-black design current boards have.

I wish there was more purple hardware ^^

10 euro each

imi wrote on 2020-08-26, 16:38:

I wish there was more purple hardware ^^

Indeed!
But I'm in love with those navy blue boards. I keep staring at them. 😁

This thing... Not really vintage as it's Pentium 4 Northwood, still I couldn't resist this Desktop ATX Enlight case along with TDK and Creative drives. Interesting Intel motherboard and Rambus memory and Sapphire Radeon 9000 AGP too. And price was good.
Now I have tower ATX Enlight, minitower Englight and desktop Enlight of the same series.

Nice sturdy case indeed! The insides can be quite a fast Win98 system.

So what do you do when you have 1 week off? You buy a mini mainframe.... or at least sort of...

Bought a Wang 2200 MVP-A today 😀 Made somewhere between 1976-1979 according to the different part stickers inside.

This little beast is not really PC Compatible but it Runs BASIC-2 and FORTRAN.

The CPU is fully TTL Logic, with an upgrade to 64KB memory (i think, might be 128kb) and runs about comparable to 2-3 MHz ish in speed.

The CPU can support up to 4 terminals with the current IO card, both locally or 2 via RS-232-C Modem connection. And lets you share the connected peripherals like the enormous line printer or the Drive Cabinet that houses two whopping 8" Floppy drives! (those can hold 260K each...)

After giving everything a good clean I powered them on, no magic smoke whatsoever! Only the green CRT monitor slowly faded to black and didn't show any sign of life after that. it still beeps though!

Seems like a nice winter project 😀 Still need to overhaul the disk drives before giving those a try, probably some belts that need replacing etc..

I've used the cat for Size comparison... it's NOT a small cat...

Master_Shifu wrote on 2020-08-26, 19:22:

Bought a Wang 2200 MVP-A today 😀

Beautiful, love it!

ps. Screen rot is treatable.
https://www.vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=675

Master_Shifu wrote on 2020-08-26, 19:22:

So what do you do when you have 1 week off? You buy a mini mainframe.... or at least sort of... […]
Show full quote

So what do you do when you have 1 week off? You buy a mini mainframe.... or at least sort of...

Bought a Wang 2200 MVP-A today 😀 Made somewhere between 1976-1979 according to the different part stickers inside.

This little beast is not really PC Compatible but it Runs BASIC-2 and FORTRAN.

The CPU is fully TTL Logic, with an upgrade to 64KB memory (i think, might be 128kb) and runs about comparable to 2-3 MHz ish in speed.

The CPU can support up to 4 terminals with the current IO card, both locally or 2 via RS-232-C Modem connection. And lets you share the connected peripherals like the enormous line printer or the Drive Cabinet that houses two whopping 8" Floppy drives! (those can hold 260K each...)

After giving everything a good clean I powered them on, no magic smoke whatsoever! Only the green CRT monitor slowly faded to black and didn't show any sign of life after that. it still beeps though!

Seems like a nice winter project 😀 Still need to overhaul the disk drives before giving those a try, probably some belts that need replacing etc..

I've used the cat for Size comparison... it's NOT a small cat...

VERY nice sir!!! I look forward to seeing the restore project. Of course Vcfed folks will probably be able to help you with it along the way. My winter project this year will be getting two ALR 6x6 servers up and running and see how well Doom runs on them. 🤣

Miphee wrote on 2020-08-26, 19:26:

Beautiful, love it! […]
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Master_Shifu wrote on 2020-08-26, 19:22:

Bought a Wang 2200 MVP-A today 😀

Beautiful, love it!

ps. Screen rot is treatable.
https://www.vintagecomputer.net/browse_thread.cfm?id=675

Thanks! Already found that info but was missing some materials to separate them today 😀
If it wasn't for that post I might have passed on it, but when I finally picked it up I saw instantly that it was just the glue layer that rotted, nothing serious!

The display fading to black on the other hand... not sure yet where to look, all fuses seem fine so time to dig into the maintenance manuals

imi wrote on 2020-08-26, 16:38:

I wish there was more purple hardware ^^

I miss the old PNY "Verto" video cards with the bright purple PCB. Those were cool.

Master_Shifu wrote on 2020-08-26, 19:36:

The display fading to black on the other hand... not sure yet where to look, all fuses seem fine so time to dig into the maintenance manuals

Let's hope it's not filled with proprietary components like my Bunker Ramo 2200 terminal.

flupke11 wrote on 2020-08-26, 18:42:

Nice sturdy case indeed! The insides can be quite a fast Win98 system.

Northwood is 2002 CPU, so calls rather for XP to be period correct build... I doubt I still had 98 in 2002 although I was AMD guy back then and I think I still had Athlon 1GHz (Orion core) CPU...

I don't know if this is more "junk" than "retro", but I'll post it here anyways 😀 Bought this 2006 MacBook for five euros 😁 I don't really care for Intel macs, but at this price, it was cheap enough to buy for no reason. Maybe I'll use it as MP3 jukebox in my garage workshop or something.

It has 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo, 512MB RAM, 60GB hard drive. To my surprise, it seems to work perfectly fine. I don't have a charger for it, but the battery had 10% charge, which allowed me to take a look around. All previous owner's stuff is still there. Some people really don't seem to care what happens to their data, when they get rid of their old computers.