c***-? Grabbed almost everything I bid on in recent weeks.
I saw that the same guy got almost everything. I'm glad that vintagecomputermuseum didn't get the stuff. If you really wanted the stuff, you might have tried bidding a little more. It might not have made a difference, but the stuff went for pennies on the dollar.
I wonder if the guy that got the stuff is a member here. He got a real bargain from what I can tell. He got a DPU, memory controller, a couple of the special memory boards, and a MFM hard drive controller. Everything except the floppy controller board, and he didn't bid on it. I think his average cost was $80 or less for the whole buch. That's a bargain in my book. He paid less for the lot than the DPU cost when new. Those particular Cromemco boards don't come up for sale often, and the ones sold looked to be in excellent condition. Of course that does say much for the operating condition, since the condition of the Cromemco mainframe that they came out of is not known.
All the way back as early as 1990, I was already noticing that the power supply capacitors in the Cromemco mainframes were going bad. People that were buying Compupro board from me were blowing the boards up, and returning them under warranty for repair. When I actually got my hands on the User's Cromemco mainframes, I discovered that the power supplies were all taking a dump. For that reason, I had to start limiting/denying free warranty repairs to owners of Cromemco mainframes with defective power supplies. I suspect that was one of the reasons that I saw many Cromemco mainframes/systems being dumped as non-functional surplus (I was attending Air Force Surplus Auctions during that time period) during the time when they continued to hold on to, and operate their Compupro Systems.
One client bought a single Compupro board from me for his Cromemco. Less than a week later, he brought the board back non-functional. I repaired it under warranty for free, noting that it had about six chips that had failed. Less than a week later, he contacted me complaining that the board had failed again. I asked him to bring the Cromemco mainframe in so I could take a look at the power supply. I found that the power supply caps had failed and what he had on the motherboard dc power lines was AC voltage. The board that he bought from me now had over 20 additional bad chips on it. I charged him to fix the board this time. I also charged him to replace the logic boards on both of the Shugart SA-860 1/2 height 8" DSDD floppies that he had installed in the same mainframe, and sold him a complete set of Compupro boards for another computer he was building.
