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For Sale: spotted on Craigslist (continuous sightings)

TanruNomad said:
He might have been responding to barythrin regarding buying stuff out of state and having them ship it. I've done this several times and only once got burned. But karma has a way of working things out and I found the same item for free soon after. More recently I bought a cool Nixie tube display calculator from Texas for FREE + shipping last year with no issues. However, I would be very reluctant to pay hundreds of dollars for something without any guarantee of receiving the goods.
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Nixie tubes! I have a short Nixie tube story: When I was a young Navy tech stationed at Kodiak, AK, (@ 1961) the first Nixie tube device that I ever saw was possibly a FR-38 frequency counter, located in the Com/Nav/Radar shop. It had about 6 or 8 verticle rows of Nixie tubes ranging from 0 on the bottom through 9 on the top. Someone figuered out that if you put the counter in one of its test or cal modes, the Nixie tubes would randomly light at fairly brisk pace. So, that was our 'horse race' game. You took one row and next fellow took a row and so on. When you pulled it out of the test/cal mode, who ever had the highest lit Nixie tube won. We didn't have a lot of money and we certainly didn't seem to have much to do at times.
 
:p That's awesome! Love stories like that. They should include that in the casinos :) I'd probably play just for the fact it uses Nixie tubes! Have you ever thought about buying one of those Nixie tube clocks?
 
TanruNomad said:
Yeah, those are ridiculous. There was a guy with 15 or so 950's out here and he couldn't even give them away for free so he trashed them. I was able to grab 2 of them before the dump and used them on my AT&T 3B2 400.
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That's kind of the thing now though. We are unlikely to run into 15 950's being trashed much anymore. They've all been trashed. Even if someone does find a pallet full clearing an old business it all usually just goes to recycling now. They just want it gone. You can't blame them.
 
TanruNomad said:
He might have been responding to barythrin regarding buying stuff out of state and having them ship it. I've done this several times and only once got burned. But karma has a way of working things out and I found the same item for free soon after. More recently I bought a cool Nixie tube display calculator from Texas for FREE + shipping last year with no issues. However, I would be very reluctant to pay hundreds of dollars for something without any guarantee of receiving the goods.
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Agreed... there are ways to handle this though... namely you could pay the additional for a proxy pay option. I did that one time long ago before the days of eBay when I bought an expensive item off of usenet. It wasn't too much additional to pay in the grand scheme of things, and I had the option to inspect before releasing the cash to the seller.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Very cool--one of the first dot-matrix printers. I wish that the rest of the development system had been offered as well, however.
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My dad was a Signetics Field Application Engineer. I remember seeing the rest of the system but one of his coworkers got it. Who knows where it is now. (Unfortunately, we all know the most likely answer to that)

I had fun in high school hooking this guy up to Windows 3.1. It has a cool pneumatic dashpot to catch the carriage return, as the motor drive only worked in the positive direction and relied on a spring to bring the print head back.
 
I recall using one of the first (and maybe only) dot-matrix printers made by Diablo. It was unbelivably loud, would move around the table if not anchored down and the carriage movement could cause serious damage to you should you stick your hand into the works while it was printing. A real workhorse if you could take the noise.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I recall using one of the first (and maybe only) dot-matrix printers made by Diablo. It was unbelivably loud, would move around the table if not anchored down and the carriage movement could cause serious damage to you should you stick your hand into the works while it was printing. A real workhorse if you could take the noise.
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Not daisy wheel?
 
dorkbert said:
Not daisy wheel?
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No, dot-matrix. We had some guys who had worked for Diablo and they brought it with them. Wierd beast--about the size of a Hitype I with (ISTR) external power supply, it used three Rockwell microcontrollers--PPS-8, I think, that came in those weird Rockwell staggered-row DIPs. I don't recall the model number, but we ran tractor-feed paper through it.
 
Those Rockwell chips really did kinda look like a bug.
Chuck(G), these the ones you're talking about ?
rockwell24ki2.jpg

Seen them over the years, never actually used them.
patscc
 
Only Wicat pics I can find are multibus boards so, little doubt there. What would this be ? The only thing on bitsavers seems to be something called a WS-150 which looks like a very cool all in one box. Looking at some comments in the old-computers.com listing it looks like they had some later tower models. Probably one of those I guess since it has terminals with it.
 
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