Any 3B2/310 owners in here?

[Jim Brain]

Vintage Computer Festival wrote:

>On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, Jim Brain wrote:
>
>  
>
>>P.S.  In other news, the CBM donation was well worth picking up.  A
>>prototype Commodore 65 was included.
>>    
>>
>
>Do tell.  How did you score this load?
>
>  
>
Anticlimactically, it dropped in my lap.  About February, an email came 
in asking a few of us if we wanted equipment.  The 77 year old owner had 
not touched the equipment in years, and decided it needed to go (taking 
up room). I responded affirmatively.  Further details emerged, that the 
man had been given 3 or 4 other collections as friends departed the 
scene.  I also inferred the owner was a packrat.

After some scheduling conflicts, I was able to hike over to Kenosha, WI 
last weekend.  I had originally planned to take a small (4x8) trailer, 
but decided the owner must be exaggerating the amount of equipment, so I 
just took a small platform bike rack and some moving boxes.

I arrived to find the "mother of all packrats".  I rather wished I had 
brought the trailer.  For various reasons, the owner had not started 
packing, so we spent 8 years packing and loading.  I managed to get it 
all in the shortbed quad cab truck (with topper), but not a square foot 
to spare. 

Among the pieces I saw in passing as I stuffed the truck:

2 Extended Density CMD FD-4000 3.5" drives
10 boxes of the ED media for them.
4 FD-2000 drives
3 C128s
1 C128D
1 CMD HD
1 RAMLink
2 SuperCPU units (1 128, 1 64)
1 C65 (including 220 PS brick and step up transformer)
The 3B2
A500
A1000
2 collections of Fred Fish disks
4 or 5 collections of Commodore magazines, including Creative Computing, 
early Compute!, Ahoy!, Compute's Gazette, Commodore Power/Play, 
Commodore Microcomputing, etc.  I left some UNIX Review, C User's 
Journal, Dr. Dobb's, etc.  If someone is close to WI and interested in 
those mags, let me know.
An Apple //c complete system
A TRS-80 Coco3 system
Tons of 5.25" disks
Lots of commercial software, including disk masters, boxes, manuals, 
registration cards, etc.

To give an idea of the breadth of collecting, the man gave me a sack of 
freebie ISP disks/CDs (AOL, Earthlink, Compuserve, etc.)  Some are from 
the start of that fad.

I started unpacking last night, and quickly realized I am woefully not 
equipped for this amount of stuff.  It's going to take me a month to 
sort.  I'm putting my 7 year old in charge of cataloguing the 
magazines.  At least I unloaded enough so the overload bumpers aren't 
mashed against the axle now.

Jim




-- 
Jim Brain, Brain Innovations
brain at jbrain.com                                http://www.jbrain.com
Dabbling in WWW, Embedded Systems, Old CBM computers, and Good Times!