21st Century rag pickers
Huh. I should’ve known. You can go onto eBay and buy a flipping IBM AT if you have a mind to, so I can surely find a motherboard and CPU to match the six-year-old machine that died on me. Or match as near as dammit.
Yeah. I decided now is probably not the time to splash out on a specialist Photoshop rig.
It’s amazing how much old tech is out there for sale — some of it new in the original boxes! Mostly scavenged, though.
It’s a market that eBay has made huge, but there was always a grubby dumpster-diving ethos to personal computing. At least down at my end of the market.
When we were in London, there was a regular computer fair at Crystal Palace, with some very dodgy characters selling very dodgy gear. I loved that.
But I’ll never forget my very first computer fair. Must have been 1985 or so. The smell of several hundreds of geeks in a conference room was indescribable.
And there was a cluster of nuns waiting in line to go in.
I thought, “Nuns! Computing! That is so awesome!”
Anyhow. Excuse me. Somewhere out there, there’s an MSI MS-6788 with my name on it.
September 7, 2010 — 11:26 pm
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