Big dollars paid for Altair 8800 on Ebay

[Bob Bradlee]

For the record I have Zenith Z100 #2 stored away. I know for a fact #1 was 
scrapped for parts, and I waited several years before someone in the lab
fulfilled an old lunch room promise and saw to it that it found its way to me. 
You can not believe the shock when one night someone showed up at my 
cave and said they had a computer for my collection. 
It was the first contribution to my collection that I or my father did not purchase 
new for big bucks :)

The first time I saw #2 was when I tested a Corvis interface I had designed
and built as a contractor of a Zenith Distributor. I had to give it back when 
testing was finished. I made the request at the time, that when they junked 
that old motherboard, not to throw it away, I wanted it. 
The Corvis project was big point in my life as it was the first PCB I ever 
designed and eched. I made the bios mods to implement the Corvis 
shared file system over the world worst interface. 
The test system I was given to use, had been heavily modified over time. 
It started it's life out as a test board, and has has a zillion wire mods on the 
back and front of the first generation mother board.

In it's second life, I added a 5 1/4 hard disk and an 8087.
I mostly ran Autocad on it. It will most likely continue to rot in storage 
until I run out of money and I am forced to ebay it , to pay my internet bill :)
I can only hope that by then Denise has had his fill of IBM stuff, and takes 
a likings to the early days of micro development.

Are there any other Z-100 collectors out there ?

Bob Bradlee


On Wed, 26 Oct 2005 18:51:52 +0200, Tore S Bekkedal wrote:

>On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 06:51 -0600, Gary Fisher wrote:
>> Take a look at item #8707485844 
>> It went for USD $7,877.11 for a supposedly serial number 3 unit
>Heh, so now the first three Altairs are accounted for, then? #1 lost in
>the mail, #2 in the basement of Robert Cringely (sp?), and now #3 :)

>-toresbe