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2,200 forgotten vintage computers from a barn in Massachusetts
- frozenport 3y agoIn context Mintel would launch at the same time with much more success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
- fabricedeville 3y agoWasn’t it basically given to every household?
- kristopolous 3y agoIt's a large quantity but it looks like the going price is about $120. I presume these were going out untested. So really, $60 sounds a bit cheap but really not unusual. The 2,000+ of them is the real crazy part. Sadly, just because something is 40 years old doesn't mean it will fetch a high price. Especially microcomputers. There's a bunch of rare and also cheap ones. Rare because almost nobody wants them and cheap for the same reason. For an equivalent today, think about some low end random model android phone from the early 2010s. Both cheap and rare
- jsnell 3y agoThe article says they were tested. > Plus, they were essentially new. “It’s new old stock, but it is tested,” he says at the beginning of the clip. “I think the seller actually peeled the original tape off, tested it, and then taped it back up again.”
- kristopolous 3y agoOh I didn't read closely. In that case, good deal
- jeremyjh 3y agoI mean you can write Z80 assembler on one. Who cares if it was popular in the 80s?
- ChickeNES 3y agoI think I was one of the last to score it at $100 a few days ago. It's been relisted at $120 and $180 and is now gone again. I assume this article will result in the full stock being sold shortly
- kristopolous 3y agoCome back in a few months. I think it'll go back down. Z80s aren't really that hard to come by. IBM PC complete with manuals and keyboard? Yes, expensive. Z80? Not so much
- saghm 3y ago> Sadly, just because something is 40 years old doesn't mean it will fetch a high price. Especially microcomputers. There's a bunch of rare and also cheap ones. > Rare because almost nobody wants them and cheap for the same reason. > For an equivalent today, think about some low end random model android phone from the early 2010s. Both cheap and rare There was an episode of the Dead Zone that had a twist like this. The main character and some others were out in the woods and came across some people who took them hostage while trying to look for a plane that had crashed nearby a decade or two ago and was rumored to have really expensive cargo. In the end, they plane turned out to be full of computer chips that were high end at the time of the crash but virtually worthless in the present.
- bombcar 3y agoIt’s also the plot to one of the Han Solo short stories.
- ekaryotic 3y agocliffhanger with sylvester stallone too.
- SomeRndName11 3y agoMust have been a box of 7400s, lol
- shortformblog 3y agoThe prices have only been going up because the supply has been dwindling down. When he started selling them at first, it was $59.99, but he is now down to less than 100 units. He is likely basically out at this point. It is one seller, he has been testing them all.
- htk 3y agoA brand new keyboard from the early 80's. Curious to type on that.
- hakfoo 3y agoIt's linear. The keycaps are pretty decent, The layout is a little weird, but not as strange as many other machines of the era.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoGreat story! Vintage computers will always hold some value, however a vintage network resurrection is priceless.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoIsn't this post from 4 days ago? Reinvited when it had a bunch of upvotes already?
- TacticalCoder 3y agoThat's weird, I see the same (and I read that thread a few days ago). I see the top comment as from 4 hours ago but then in the user's history it's from 4 days ago. I'm confused.
- EvanAnderson 3y agoI’ve seen this with other posts in the past. I’m glad somebody else is acknowledging it. I was having a major “Mandela effect” feeling when I noticed it.
- fsckboy 3y agowe need a Streisand effect in the new submissions queue: if a whole bunch of people downvote it, it is by definition interesting.
- detaro 3y agothe HN mods "re-upped" this submission, which works by pretending that it was submitted later (and hence the ranking calculation treats it as new etc). It also fudges how the timestamps appear on the page. (presumably because otherwise people would be confused why a post from an hour ago has comments made 4 days ago) On the user pages this doesn't happen and it shows the original time.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> It also fudges how the timestamps appear on the page. Oh that's interesting, thanks for the explanation! (and a bit weird too but not in a bad way)
- 3y ago
- EvanAnderson 3y agoLeo Binkowski (developer for NABU and quoted in the article) gave a nice talk at VCF East earlier this year: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IhPsNQBCKfM https://youtube.com/watch?v=IhPsNQBCKfM
- qup 3y agoWhen I see things I like this, I immediately want them. But then I realize I would probably boot it a few times and put it to rest. I have many computing devices I don't use. If we were to gift this in the most optimum way for a person who would actually put this machine into service...who would that be? What criteria make this the correct solution?
- verst 3y agoThe living computers museum in Seattle was amazing. Volunteers maintained all kinds of computing devices there. Visitors to the museum got to interact with any of the devices. https://livingcomputers.org/ https://livingcomputers.org/
- 13of40 3y agoAnother cool place to visit is the RE-PC on 6th street in Seattle, where they have a small retro computer museum. Years ago I got to watch the old guy who ran the place boot the PDP-8 there by toggling the boot code from (his) memory using the switches on the front.
- toast0 3y agoThere's also a re-pc in tukwilia near sea-tac with a small museum section. The unaffiliated recycled PC store in Tacoma has a bit of a museum section too, although a lot less inventory. I still miss weird stuff in sunnyvale, but this will have to do.
- calgarymicro 3y agoThis place was shut down by Paul Allen's sister after he died, in case anyone was wondering.
- 93po 3y agoYeah pretty sad story, can't have cost that much to keep this going. Greed is sad.
- 3y ago
- 29athrowaway 3y agoHow does this NABU service ("Internet 10 ahead of its time") compare to networks such as CompuServe?
- ok123456 3y agoProbably comparable to Quantum Link: an online service that served a homogeneous network of home computers through custom client software that allowed for running arbitrary executable code.
- shortformblog 3y agoAuthor here. The key differentiator is the use of cable, which was at least 15 years ahead of its time. While the service itself was capable of bidirectional communication like a modem, it was often on one-way networks because the technology had not been upgraded. Quantum Link and Prodigy are likely the most common comparison points, though this used a proprietary platform for much of its life, leaving out people who already owned, say, an IBM PC or C64.
- zw123456 3y agoI just had a flashback to 1984 when I was at Bell Labs when the Bell System was broken up and someone called me and said they "Found a building that had been misplaced" and that it was full of equipment they could not figure out what it was and if I could come and take a look to see what this stuff was. It was kind of funny, but that a company that size could misplace a warehouse full of old computer equipment is not exactly shocking. Most of it was old PDP11/70's and PDP8's, still in their original boxes and packaging, never opened or used. Even by then, it was pretty outdated having been surpassed by the Vax and 3B20's etc. But it was an amazing find. I told them it was old stuff and useless and to just sell it on the surplus market for whatever you can get.
- sitkack 3y agoShould have closed the door and said don't open until 2030!
- neilv 3y agoLike the "barn find" Porsche ad? https://www.pinterest.com/pin/59954238762243974/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/59954238762243974/
- KennyBlanken 3y agoI think the fascinating bit is that ebay locked down his account to "verify they were actually his to sell." Which seems an awful lot like "we're just going to, uh, you know, hang on to the ~$28,000 you just made. For a couple of months." Was he still responsible for shipping the orders while they held onto his money? Not everyone can afford to just shovel out the shipping and labor needed to do that. Has anyone been through this who will talk about what it involved?
- mips_r4300i 3y agoYears ago I set up a business PayPal account after selling through my personal for years. After taking orders, I pulled in $13k in a few days and went to pay my suppliers, only to find PayPal had frozen my account for suspected fraud. I had already provided all the tax information and so on, but they insisted on freezing my account for 12 months! Magnanimously, they allowed me to withdraw $300 per month. After 6 months, PayPal let me take out 600 per month. In the end it took 2 years to get the money out, and I shut down the account and never touched a PayPal merchant account again. In the meantime, I kept my business going by selling through Stripe and front loading enough sales to ship the orders for the earlier customers. Was a fun time! So while it wasn't through eBay, like this seller, I would say he's very fortunate to reach someone in support there with a brain and common sense.
- shortformblog 3y agoAuthor here. I didn’t talk about this in detail in the piece out of respect to James, but long story short, it was messy. But on the other hand, it gave him a chance to ship the sudden backlog of units he had (560 units in three days!). He did sell the devices on his website in the meantime.
- kemiller 3y agoWow I’ve heard of barn finds with cars but not computers!
- fsckboy 3y agoin the digital age the surprising part is finding an old barn
- chejazi 3y ago> For those reading this who haven’t bought a new-in-box retro computer lately, $59.99 is fall-out-of-your-chair cheap, but Pellegrini has largely avoided price-gouging. Only recently did he increase the price to $99.99. Looks like they've raised prices a few times since. Latest listing by them is at $180: https://www.ebay.com/itm/394715695041 https://www.ebay.com/itm/394715695041
- mk_stjames 3y agoWhenever I read things like this I think less about the items in question and more, "How is it these people get thousands of square feet of cheap or free industrial storage space for decades... and I can't find a shop to setup in for less than $XXXX k a month...."
- rootusrootus 3y agoYou're looking too close to civilization. Go away from the cities a bit and stuff gets much cheaper.
- fnord77 3y agoso, canadian Minitel
- shortformblog 3y ago… using coaxial cable at a time when everyone else was using modems.
- Animats 3y agoThere were other systems like that. I used to find terminals for "101 Online" in Silicon Valley surplus stores. This was a US attempt to use Minitel technology.[1] There was the whole North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax [2] thing, which was like having your terminal talk .SVG. Lots of dead ends from that era. [1] https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2016/01/man2016010006/13rRUIJcWmX https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2016/01/man2016010... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAPLPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAPLPS
- circles_for-day 3y agoOld computers suck
- xwdv 3y agoClearly we’ve missed the boat on buy one of these computers, but people also don’t think they’re that great. Are there any specific vintage computers one should definitely buy immediately if the opportunity comes up?
- gattilorenz 3y agoThe one of your childhood experiences (I bought an old ADI 14" CRT monitor, nothing special but it looks almost identical to the one I used until ~2008), or teenager envy (my small collection of Voodoo 2 cards I found for free in the early 2010s, and I took them because I SO wanted them and could not afford them in ~1998... now I can play those game in beautiful Glide mode instead of simply software rendering), or the one that spark your interest for some reason (say, Unix workstations of the 90s, because as soon as you boot one up it feels like $HOME, even if a machine is almost 30 years old). There is no inherently "great" retrocomputer: they're mostly all old crap. Sure, you can make money if you buy a SGI Octane low and resell it high, but it's pretty hard to get one for a low price... and I would get emotionally attached to it anyway.
- DeathArrow 3y ago>Are there any specific vintage computers one should definitely buy immediately if the opportunity comes up? Several times I felt the impulse to buy old hardware such as Commodore C64, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, some Z80 ZX Spectrum clones, HP Jornada, Nokia Communicator, 386 Laptops, but I am glad I didn't. I would have played one or two days with each and I would have lost interest after, so that would mean loss of money and storage space.
- pvaldes 3y agoI bet that the obliterated Mariupol museum of computers would happily adopt and give a home to any of those compuppies after the war
- KingOfCoders 3y ago"[...] where retro tech collectors hid." In the dark? Quality journalism.
- bsenftner 3y agoSurprising to see that "Miner 2049er" game loading screen - I wrote Miner 2049er, but for the Vic-20 back in '82. I wonder if someone else ported it? I shipped the game with the source code, so people could muck with it, as people did back then...
- MarkusWandel 3y agoThe interesting NABU was IMHO not these, but the NABU 1200. An early 8086 Unix machine. I got one at a garage sale in 1993 or so. It worked, and the Microsoft Xenix 1.0 was a direct port of V7 Unix from Bell Labs and quite educational in this respect precisely because it was still simple and understandable, compared to to the work station OS's of the time. Proprietary no-source OS's were still common then, so binary patching the kernel to put in a different hard disk parameter table (to use a luxuriously large 20MB drive in place of the ST412 the machine came with - precious! Must not mess with the irreplaceable original OS image) was undaunting, especially with a .h file handy that gave the structure. Compiling "elvis" to get vi in the absolutely stripped down Minix mode, that used 63Kbytes of the maximum 64K of code space that executables could use... fun times. Of course back then you still had a hope of compiling current C with ancient pre-ANSI K&R C compiler. Most stuff that I ran on the machine didn't need much porting.
- samstave 3y agoYou know what I would truly love out of an AI/LLM == A crawler across everything tech which takes a comment such as yours, and then parses out all the systems/people/code/languages/companies/timeframe and builds a really good history of computing. That would be absolutely beautiful. AI Keeping its own evolutionary tree documented... and turned into a teaching platform.
- wpietri 3y agoI think "really good" is where we cross the point from LLM to AGI in that it can't just be a fancy autocomplete. It has to have decent model of readers to test various prose and structure options against to figure out which ones are "really good" for particular readers.
- samstave 3y agoIt will be interesting to see who conquers this space
- soligern 3y ago
- em-bee 3y agoi am most fascinated by the bidirectional cable connection that his device was using. it shows that with more investment we could have had something like the internet 15-20 years earlier. so the primary roadblock for development at the time was cost, not capacity. i believe today most development happens at max capacity, because cost is no longer much of an issue.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- giantrobot 3y agoThe Internet (ARPANET) had been in existence for a few years by the time these came to market. How would a product release after the Internet existed somehow make the Internet exist any earlier?
- hakfoo 3y agoConsumer-facing internet wasn't widely available at the time. I'm not sure if this represented the potential to sell people on the Internet, or just on online services as a whole. As I understand it, the NABU platform was still (in its original form) a walled-garden, just like CompuServe, The Source, or GEnie in the same era, or even the Minitel-style platforms in Europe. The unique proposition of connecting to another system ran by an unrelated party was still not there. If we roll it back to "this might have kickstarted adoption of online services", that's an interesting discussion. From my perspective, I think people were averse to early online services because most dial-up online services were extremely expensive before the 1990s. A few dollars an hour adds up fast especially at low bandwidth. I can recall my family getting its first PC (~1992 or so) and being warned never to click the icons for AOL (the early GeoWorks based version) or the terminal emulator due to cost concerns (although it would have been moot because the PC didn't have a modem!) Part of that was that a lot of the walled-garden services used existing commercial timesharing networks for access, and those were priced for people whose business was paying for it. In the NABU design, the infrastructure was owned by the cable firm in the first place, and there's no risk you're pushing off a better-paying customer. What did the price plans look like? If they had treated it as an unlimited, flat-rate package, then adoption would have been a lot higher. I also understand at least some forms of the NABU system were aggressively unidirectional-- a lot of the software was on an 'endless loop' where you waited for what you wanted to cycle past again to start downloading it. That probably helped keep the infrastructure costs manageable, only the much smaller upstream link needed to be managed on a per-user basis.