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DEC units on ebay

eestes3 said:
I am watching this one and got one of those discount offers in my email for 5K off. Woohoo only 20K. Fantasy land number!
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I too got the same offer. 🤣

I wonder what is driving this current insanity. Maybe there is too much money looking for somewhere to invest? Maybe those who got burned with crypto-currencies are now buying up old computers instead.
 
eestes3 said:
I am watching this one and got one of those discount offers in my email for 5K off. Woohoo only 20K. Fantasy land number!
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i tried submitting an equally absurd $1 offer but they have minimums enabled :( and here i was hoping they would at least see it...
 
RandomDesign said:
Really interesting one that popped up this weekend: https://www.ebay.com/itm/394353278607
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I consider that a fairly reasonable price actually, less money than a blinkenlights console but actually useful as a standalone item (no minis were harmed).
I owned one and someone paid about that for it fifteen years ago. Mine did have way more jumpers and came with the instructor and student manual, but still.
 
Interesting ebay insanity over two ordinary PDP-8/e M8320 bus load boards:
Both were in similar condition and sold by the same seller (sdinet). The cheaper one looked nice and clean. The expensive one had some brown yucky goo on it.

Despite the anonymized bidding history you can see that there was some bid overlap. The bidder with 8 Ebay ratings bid up to US$141 on the expensive board but bailed out at US$91 on the cheaper board. He probably could have had the board at his earlier bid of US$141.

Maybe that brown yucky goo made the expensive board more valuable? Can a bit of poo be considered "value add"? 😜

Here are a few more "interesting" ones.

M8330:
M849 (RFI shield - just a blank PCB):
What went wrong on November 10? What caused the "feeding frenzy"?

I wonder if there was/is some "buyer's remorse" on November 10?

Also interesting to now see two of Rod Smallwood's panel reproductions to sell on Ebay for more than double the price of what Rod was asking for them. On November 10 and November 30 they sold for approximately the same amount US$218.50 versus US$204.19. Both times the buyers paid too much, but at least the valuation was consistently over the top.

Anyway - seller "sdinet" did well. Lucky to be selling when the crazies are on the loose. 😜
 
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I won three of those boards in the SDI's second auction. I have done business with him before. He is reputable. I think the prices being paid for the front glass replica are a bit nuts though.
 
There is nothing wrong with seller "sdinet" (except exorbitant international shipping), but there where some bids for "sdinet" gear on November 10 which were not rational. Strangely on November 30 those irrational bidders didn't show up.
 
For a brand new LA30 in original packaging, $350 seems like a good price to me.

It looks like it was manufactured in 1999, I didn't know they were still being made that recently.

Can you still get ribbons for it?
 
DougIngraham said:
For a brand new LA30 in original packaging, $350 seems like a good price to me.

It looks like it was manufactured in 1999, I didn't know they were still being made that recently.

Can you still get ribbons for it?
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maybe i'm mistaken, didn't LA30s break all the time? i remember chatting with someone about a desktop DEC printer that was notorious for breaking down constantly, i thought it was the LA30
 
If memory serves, the LA30 was a teletype looking thing with a keyboard, which was replaced in mid-70's by the LA36. This auction is for an LA30N which is a much newer product.

I think we had (late 80's) an LA120 for a console printer which jammed was jammed most every morning because Ultrix printed the date/time every 10 minutes. I don't recall any failures over ~4 years other than poor paper handling.

CW
 
The LA30 is a dot-matrix printer. Is has no friction feed for paper, only pin-feed. And the pin-feed paper is a non-standard size. To make things "worse", the pin-feed wheels cannot be moved, so you really need to have that non-standard pin-feed paper. As far as I know, the LA30 was the first dot-matrix printer from DEC. It is quite heavy and in the "top" of the pedestal is a steel box with a card cage. The keyboard resembles the VT05 keyboard.
This LA30N is (I guess) at least 20 years newer than the "original" LA30.
The LA30N has no value (to me), but I drove some 3300 km in a weekend, and had 2 hotel stays (Saturday and Sunday night) to pick up an LA30 (at Mattis' ).
 
Hi Mattis,
so far, I only cleaned the LA30 🥴
I should have made it working after all this time, but still need to check things out. Time ...
But I will retire in 22 months, then I will have time (I hope :whistle:)
 
There is an auction for 4 DEC VR201 terminals, but he has only 1 cable. Oddly enough, there is a guy selling 3 cables in a completely different part of the country.
Anybody have experience with the VR201's? They seem to real problems with a film on the inside of the glass.
 
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