E-bay complaints

[Jules Richardson]

On Mon, 2005-07-04 at 18:23 +0100, Philip Pemberton wrote:
> In message <42C96493.1C70AEA5 at rain.org>
>           Marvin Johnston <marvin at rain.org> wrote:
> 
> > I just sold an MPF-1 on VCM (http://www.vintagecomputermarketplace.com/)
> > for $20.00. Sure, I could have probably gotten more for it on Ebay, but
> > why not list stuff *FIRST* on VCM with a reasonable price that sellers
> > can live with????? And once the ad copy and photo(s) are taken, it is
> > trivial to move the listing over to Ebay if it doesn't sell on VCM.
> 
> I actually saw that one first - then spotted the "SOLD" tag next to it. I
> would have paid that in a heartbeat...
> 
> > And I couldn't agree more with Joe's comments; there is a LOT of stuff
> > out there for anyone who takes the time to develop a network and
> > sources. As one example, I would have never gotten the worlds largest
> > supply of existing Polymorphic software, documentations, equipment, etc.
> > without the network I have in place. Nor would I (in years past) have
> > aquired some 50 coinop arcade games at no charge (most are now gone.)
> 
> I've tried looking around here - talked to friends, mentioned a few of my
> hobbies, and all I ended up with was 10 useless 486-class PCs.

Most of the stuff I get (albeit for the museum, not personally) comes
from local usenet groups, or the university - it's at the stage now
where the local population seem to know to chuck things this way. I've
only recently joined the local freecycle group, so I'm not sure how good
that'll be in terms of stuff yet.

Landfill / scrapyards in the UK don't seem to be anything like their US
counterparts according to what I've seen on this list - there just
aren't items there for the taking.

I suspect a *lot* of smaller machines are tucked away in lofts, but the
big stuff's reasonably hard to come by over here - although we'll
usually get offered one 19" rack-sized machine a month on average,
sometimes from companies and sometimes from collectors (or former
collectors) who want the space back.

There is stuff out there anyway - you just need to give people a prod
every once in a while and get yourself noticed as someone who can give
this stuff a home.

cheers

Jules