Fw: Re: [Milsurplus] Five dollar stuff

[windy10605 at juno.com]

Yes, and the IBM convertible (first IBM 80C88 Laptop) and the rarest
option, one with low power hard drive. I was Planar HW Development Mgr.

73 Kees K5BCQ


--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: William Donzelli <aw288 at osfn.org>
To: Milsurplus at mailman.qth.net
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 22:52:26 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: [Milsurplus] Five dollar stuff
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.4.20.0409152232350.21000-100000 at osfn.org>

> Think their may be a couple more collectors of
> this stuff around now then before...

This is a bit of an understatement.

For quite a few years now, the old radio people (including some of us
milsurplus types) have been complaining and worrying about the apparent
decline in interest amongst the younger crowd. Everyone can see this. It
was very apparent to me at this year's AWA show in Rochester - there may
have been *two* people under 30.

The problem isn't that "kids don't care about old stuff", as many of us
think - a decent number do, but it isn't with old radio junk. It is with
old computers.

The ranks of old computer collectors is growing at an incredible rate -
it
has for the past five or six years. I would wager that their number
currently outshines the number of us collecting military radios, and in a
few years, it may actually surpass the number of people collecting old
radios.

Many of these kids (I apply this to people 15 to 34!) are tired of
mundane
*nix or Microsoft machines, and like to get their hands dirty with old
machines - the kinds with huge disks, blinkenlights, tons of ICs, and big
fans. And get thir hands dirty they do - scopes and logic probes in hand,
schematic on the table, watching individual bits in the machine. Some
have
even rebuilt hard disks back to life!

So now you all know where the kids went...

> but if your looking for something
> equivalent to the ARC-5 thing maybe you should consider a first
> generation PC or XT, I have a couple old IBM fifty-one hundred series
> 8088 systems and wear everyone may consider them useless just think
> about it. That is the first of the series of modern desktop systems;
> almost everything after was influenced by it, and was produced in the
> thousands. 

5150s (the original PC) are collectable, but they are still quite easy to
get. IBM made zillions of them, then proceded to make tens of zillions of
5160 XTs, and so forth. Some of the real oddballs are hard to get, like
the Tempest PC (to keep things on topic-ish), PC/GX, AT/370, 7531 & 7532
Industrial PCs, and so forth. I suppose some of them are like AN/ARC-5s,
with the impossibly hard to find variants next to the common as dirt
types!

William Donzelli
aw288 at osfn.org

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