Vintage computer equipment is not just for collectors

From time to time I sell vintage computer equipment. In most cases the buyers are collectors. But once in a blue moon I come across people who actually use this equipment for work rather than pleasure. Here's one example.

Picked up a pair of vintage Toshiba Satellite Pro 420CDT 11.3" laptops that both came with external 3.5" floppy drives. They did not have power adapters so there was no way for me to test their functionality. Threw them on eBay "as is" and they sat there for quite a while. I decided to take one apart just for sh1ts and giggles. The very next day I get an email from someone interested in just the floppy. So I sent it to him and got this response:

Quote:

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The floppy arrived and I’m happy to report it works fine. ... I’m a writer and use those old Toshiba laptops for my work. I strip them of the windows operating system and install dos 6.22 then WordPerfect 5.1 , my preferred writing program, having used it for over thirty years. I don’t need Hard drives or CD roms but am always on the lookout for batteries and floppies and Toshiba Satellite pro laptops that work, I have several of them, but they’re old and break down.

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I was a bit surprised, but hey, if it's true that some of the US nuclear weapons facilities still use 8" floppy drives then maybe I shouldn't be... :)

By the way, the 2nd laptop sold on eBay the other day as well...

hmmm might have to go thru all the laptops i have sitting around an see what i have .

Yup. I use an old Compaq nw8448 (I think it is) laptop because it has a PCMCIA slot. My camera shoots on cards that slide right into The PCMCIA slot. Then I just move the files over the network to my Mac.

Basically a poor man's card reader.

indeed this is why I always list everything the things I may even want to toss as trash go for a bit

Yeah, theres lots of industries that use dated electronics...its pretty easy to get into that situation. My experience is from the sawmill game: You buy a piece of machinery that has the latest electronics come with it (and they usually have a PC-type human-machine interface)...the machine is worth a few million $ and it will run for 20 years. In a few years the electronics are becoming dated; in 10 years most every electronic device in there is obsolete.

But the mechanical part of the machine still has lots life left in it.

So the maintenance guys make a plea to management to update the electronics. They find that the updated electronics from the supplier are upwards of a million bucks. The payback isn't there. So management drags their feet. and the maintenance guys are buying old electronics offa eBay and retired guys from the original supplier.

Worse yet, is the scenario where the OEM supplier has sold out or gone bankrupt . We had this scenario, too. We ended up talking to a guy who used to work there and had some knowlege of the scanning equipment and a few parts...

Trying to find industrial computer parts was a pain, too. We had old VME bus computer equipment where the common cards were more-or-less still available but any off-beat cards where nigh on impossible to find.

Thats why there are lots of electronics outfits around that fix and resell old industrial electronics.

Some people may ask why not just upgrade, even go to an newer board in an older electronics package? The answer is the work required to get it working....programming, which is neigh on impossible when you don't have the people or the code to do it, and the rewiring that may be necessary.

All this tells me that there is a niche for some older electronics...but probably takes a while before buyer and seller can connect. If you have some oddball industrial equipment boards it might be worth checking with the guys who fix and sell the old industrial stuff. There's a chance that you would get more than scrap!

Jon.