I have not seen a topic for this so I thought I would start one. Post any Apple II stuff you find or have found recently. Share stories if you would like.
There was an Apple IIc on CL for a couple of weeks. From what I saw there was the IIc, RGB monitor, IIc external drive and a printer. I inquired about it and got the guy to agree to $40 for it. He then proceeds to tell me he has a Classic Mac and a Mac SE. I asked him how much for those as well. He said make an offer, I say I need to see them first.
So this weekend I trek down to pick up the IIc and look at the Macs. IIc and extras were a little yellowed but oh well. I ask to see the Macs and my face lit up. When he opens the box I see an original 128k Mac in pretty good condition with keyboard, mouse, and external 400k drive. He then proceeds to pull out paperwork for it too.
The SE is just a standard SE, nothing special. I ask how much for everything. He says make an offer. I say $60? He says ok.
I get home and check the serial on the Mac and it is an early 1984 and it fires up faster than my Core 2 Duo Imac.
My most recent find was kind of meh. I found a IIc with monitor and Mac IIsi for $50. Cheaper than other places for sure
I had to pick up the external power supply for the IIc. The Mac IIsi took a bit more work. I replaced the power supply and was glad to hear the speakers chime and fan spin. I installed the FPU/Nubus adapter card as well as a Supermac PDQ+ card. It came with 17mb ram. Aside from fixing and upgrading it, I haven't done much with it.
I would have been happier with the find if the items had been functional/complete but I knew when I bought them that the seller "hadn't used them in years."
A couple months ago I did pick up a G4 sawtooth for $25. I had some extra ram lying around so I maxed it out. I tried installing a standard Airport card (not extreme) but the machine wouldn't boot if it was installed. If I used it for more than playing Diablo I'd be more likely to figure out what's going on there but it isn't a critical repair. OS9 is blazing fast though.
I got a very nice II Plus with drives and a few games for $75 on ebay. Nobody else bid on it because the auction also included a printer and huge monitor. The shipping would have been crazy. I asked seller if I won would he dump the printer and monitor and jsut send II plus and drives. He said sure. So I got it for $101 with shipping. I think it was a pretty good deal.
That idea had never crossed my mind. Well done.
My best recent finds were a box of about 100 used 5.25" floppies for $5, and an Epson LQ850 printer for $40 I found at Weird Stuff in Santa Clara, California.
The printer was a surprise (I was looking for the floppies, but they didn't have any). It's in excellent cosmetic condition and works perfectly.
Because you asked for recent finds and not recent acquisitions, I will now share with you my
TALE OF WOE
A few weeks ago I happen to go on Craigslist and search for Apple II. I do this from time to time and never find anything of interest.
Well, that particular Wednesday up pops "Vintage Apple II". It had been posted a few hours earlier, without a photo. The seller was asking $35. I email and ask to describe the lid -- is it an Apple II, II plus, IIe, or IIc? No reply.
On Thursday, a photo is added to the listing. It is a low res cell phone pic, but I can perceive green on the label, indicating an Apple II+. But the keyboard has an old style raised light, missing the keycap, clearly not a II+ era keyboard. Now I'm curious. Could this be an Apple II that was upgraded?
Around lunchtime on Friday I call the number in the listing. I immediately get the guy. He runs a second hand store. I ask about the Apple II. He says, oh yeah, he doesn't have the password, he can't get past the login screen. I press a little further, and it turns out he is talking about some Mac laptop. I say no, the Apple II computer... it looks like a keyboard in a beige case, with Apple II labeled on the lid. He isn't sure what I'm talking about. I'm not sure what he is talking about. After an uncomfortable silence, I thank him for his time, and hang up.
Saturday morning I get up. I can't get this mystery Apple out of my head. It's a rainy day, and an hour drive to the second hand store. Sigh. I have to go.
I arrive. The second hand store is a converted barn / garage type structure off the highway. It is filled with cool old stuff that you can never find in a Goodwill anymore. Old electronics, CB radios, dilapidated furniture, mountains of lp records. Through a small window near the ceiling, a single shaft of light enters the room. It beams down, lighting the dust particles of the air, and I follow it's siren rays, imagining a choir of angels singing, as it lands on a shelf and illuminates an ancient Apple II+.
It is in a sorry state. Dirty, dented, ignored, unloved, and in all likelihood busted. Therefore, I must have it. Tucked away inside is a set of paddles of a kind I have never seen before. The keyboard is strange, that little power light without a keycap moves up and down. I tuck the unit under my arm and as I'm opening my wallet, the proprieter apologizes and takes it away from me. It seems he had just agreed to sell it to someone else over the phone!
I thought I'd have all the time in the world, but I could investigate no further. I wish I had paid careful attention to the motherboard and read the serial on the bottom. Photographed the keyboard maybe. Written down the model of the paddles. I think of how much more fun this would have provided than the very clean, original condition, fully operational II+ sitting on my shelf at home.
Not to be.
Well don't feel bad. The keyboard sounds like a clone.
Clones are the only ones with a springy power indicator button.
So it may not have been worth much anyway.
I have to say my best recent find was about 8-9 months ago. It wasn't an apple. But a sol-20. It was packed with cards and a Z80 daughterboard upgrade. In my normal crazyness I did want to do a complete rebuild anyway so it was perfect. Let me explain.
I paid $650 shipped to a charity in California. I'm on the east coast, so shipping wasn't cheap.
Anyway... I cleaned up and tested every card in the machine using my Altair (didn't have a disk drive so I partially tested the controller) and also swapped out a white ceramic 1976 Z-80 for a plastic one on a terminal/video card.
All said and done I sold a 64k ram/rom card, ceramic Z80, jade disk controller, z80 upgrade board, terminal card and a serial card for about $800 total when you all add it up.
Then I was able to buy correctly matching ram cards and a white 8080 for about $350 total plus $70 for a keyboard rebuild kit. I actually didn't need the ram cards and I had a plastic 8080a, but I decided on a compete rebuild to what the machine looked like in 76/77 loaded. The machine also had a rare graphics-add upgrade board that I kept.
I spent a couple of weeks of spare time tearing it down to bare metal and I also had to replace a cap in the powersupply for about $10. I spent maybe 20 in paint and another 10 on stain for the wood sides.
It looks brand new.
If you guys are members of the yahoo retro-restore group I have picture up of the system there. It came out awesome.
Granted this wasn't a find for $50 bucks. But a working Sol-20 is worth a lot. Working ones rarely come up on eBay. Actually it's kinda funny but working S100 system from the 70's almost never come up on eBay(Sol, IMSAI, Altair, NorthStar). It's usually "turns on and lights up". I guess these systems aren't like Apple systems which are easy to troubleshoot. Working ones must be far and few for the 70's S100 systems.
Cheers,
Corey
It's not really recent, about a year and a half ago I was looking at the ads on comp.sys.apple2.marketplace and saw one that had been posted from Craigslist by a member of the group. It was for an Apple //c+ for $50 plus shipping, which immediately got my attention since I had been watching eBay auctions for the //c+ that generally ended in several hundred dollars. I immediately contacted the seller and made the deal for the computer. When it showed up about a week later I was surprised that there was more than one box. It turned out that I had been so excited to see //c+ for $50 that I failed to notice that price also included the green screen monitor and stand and an Imagewriter II printer! So for $90 I got a complete //c+ system.
I was walking past my neighbor's house when I noticed he was cleaning out his garage for our town's annual 'spring cleaning' trash pickup - it's that one time of the year when they'll haul just about anything to the dump that normally you'd have to pay extra for pickup. All the scrap hunters, dumpster-divers, hoarders and starving student types drive around the neighborhoods looking for trash/treasure.
The first thing I see him moving around are older Apple rainbow logo boxes. So I stop and said hello, because I wanted to see what Apple gear he had. We made small talk for a few minutes, and then I asked him if he was getting rid of some old computers. Sure enough, he's got an 'obsolete Mac' thats been in storage for years ('one of the first models' he says) and a few spares he'd picked up along the way. I told him I liked working with old computers, so he offered to load all of his old Macs into his pickup and drive them down to me. He didn't want any money for them - he just wanted to make space, and didn't want to pay recycling fees.
I knew they weren't Macs - the boxes clearly said Apple IIGS, and there were three of them along with monitors, drives and a few printers. The magic moment came when I opened the computers see what cards were installed - they all had PaceMark 4MB RAM cards, 2 had TranswarpGS accelerators, one had a PC Transporter.
It was a good day to be out for a walk.
A good day, indeed! If you ever want to get rid of one of those Transwarp GS cards send me a PM. I've been looking for one for ages.
LOL Deja vu akochera!
If your talking about the one in Texas I drove out and saw the same one, it was missing one of it's Applesoft ROMs and had a utterly scratched up apple label right?! It had a videx video card and a 16k language card. Also the yellowed out goofy looking paddles were some really rare cheap looking ones. Very interesting.
I think the guys name was Jimmy or something, the place was creepy... I loved it! I offered him $50 to see if he would take it and refund the person that paid via PayPal. He said he wished he could.
The place was a complete and utter mess of epic proportions, and the owner kept saying it would all be cleaned up in a few weeks lol. I was tripping over tons of books and LP's and all sorts of other stuff. I was there with my grandson for at least 3 hours searching for an Apple 1 lol. And it was raining like no tomorrow.
I did leave the place with a single white 5.25 LOBO disk drive. I still haven't tested it lol.
Also I think the keyboard was from a banana II, the press in power light is a CAPS lock key.