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Nice finds, really makes me wish I hadn't moved out of oregon, so much stuff to find.

My bad - it's two Keyboard IIs and one Keyboard (I).

Also - the FDHD has a hidden upgrade - a Quantum LP hard drive install on some aftermarket red aluminum sled:



So it's dual superdrive and an internal HDD. It also has the programmer switch in the side. Claris CAD is installed on the HD.

Oregon has been pretty good with the old Mac stuff. I drifted out of the vintage scene for a while after I got divorced in 2006. It seems like 2000-2005 were the boom years for finding discarded Macs and accessories for virtually nothing. The amount of stuff I had to throw away when I moved makes me a little ill today.

2000-2005 seem to be very good years for me as well in collecting (not just mac either). I wonder what the hobby was like pre 1999 (isn't that when ebay took off)? These days everything has a price associated too it, back then it was just unwanted junk.

All that stuff for $50?? Wow!

Back in 1989 I had a dual floppy + HD Mac SE like the one in your photo. I bought the HD and sled from some company that advertised in a Mac magazine. I got a 40MB drive, and the total cost was still cheaper than buying a Mac SE w/HD 20 from Apple.

Grabbed a PowerBook 140 for $10 tonight. It turns on, I get a chime but no happy Mac or disk. The SCSI drive spins up and down. I'll be checking it out further in the next couple of days.

やった！You really seem to have some luck with that. There's never any good Mac stuff for the taking down here.

Looks like bad caps on the display so it looks like a digikey order is in my future.Sounded like it booted fine from the floppy, though. I may have to give the old 40mb Conner HDD a good whack before finding a new one.

Older Macs weren't really cheap until 1998-1999. The best deal I saw pre-1998 was a stripped LC at a secondhand computer store for $25 without a monitor (I don't recall there being a keyboard or mouse either). I'm not sure if it even worked. In the mid-1990s, a compact could still fetch a few hundred (keep in mind a Classic II could have been only two years old in 1995).

Pre-eBay, the best way to get them was through the classifieds in your paper. Remember those? They didn't start turning up in school surplus or yard sales until around the time eBay came along. You could also check a computer shop to see if they had one sitting around. I got a Plus at a store specializing in upgrades in 1999 (this was the first Mac I bought to go alongside my LC and essentially the one that started my collection). It cost $50 and came with 4MB RAM, MS Works 2.0 (including every manual), a dust cover, and an external hard drive (a 20SC case with an 80MB drive inside). Original boxes for both the Plus and hard drive were included. (The only missing items were the little yellow disk protector and the Mac Plus manual). The man who ran the shop tossed a pair of LocalTalk boxes in for free so I could connect it to my LC. He also had a IIx and some sort of LC/Performa 500 series for sale. (I still have that Plus--it's one I'll never part with).

School surplus was huge from 2000-2005. Many of my Macs were acquired that way, including an iMac G3 (in 2005!) and a Color Classic. (Schools usually had tons of IIes, IIGSes, Classics, LCs (all models), occasional SEs or Pluses, a ton of ImageWriters, and later on the 5xx/5xxx computers in these sales).

Great recollection Scott Baret.

Also, mcdermd that's an awesome pickup for $50.

Is the keyboard in the styrofoam original packaging just without the cardboard slip?

Yeah, one keyboard was in the original styro box without the paperboard slip cover. They all had their RJ11 cables.

I replaced two capacitors in the PowerBook 140 screen and it has come back from the dead. Unfortunately, the Conner SCSI drive inside is dead. It spins up but won't read and it looks like someone was aggressive in taking it apart at one point because they gouged the heck out of the adapter SCSI chip. A nice, big stab to the pins on it from what would appear to be a screwdriver from the side. Pretty mangled.

Went out junk shopping with my wife today. Picked up a Powerbook 100, Powerbook Duo 270c with adapter and battery charger plus a graphite Airport base station (no adapter) for $10. Then happened upon a bunch of sealed Apple floppy labels, vintage stickers, a Powerbook floppy drive expansion bay module and an Atari 7800 for $5. Rounded it out with five pro mouses for $3 each.

Damn that's an awesome conquest!

Nice pics too.

Click to expand...

The 270c's screen looks super bright and clear. Low mileage maybe?

I'm used to the screen in my 520c and older black and white ones so I was surprised at how bright and clean that 270c's is.

Now I just need to find some sort of dock so I can do a clean OS install.

Nice score(s), it looks like the 270c screen is almost Photoshopped in! Enjoy that FPU-equipped subnotebook

I found I couldn't resist original boxes ... I bought the Wallstreet on Portland Craigslist for $30. The thing looks brand new. Not a scratch on the AC adapter. It came with all the original boxes plus two batteries, all the doc, software and the original leatherette pouches for the CD-ROM and ZIP drives. Probably one of the nicest machines in my collection now.

233MHz G3, 512MB L2 cache, 192MB RAM, 2GB HDD, CD-ROM, Zip100, Mac OS 8.6.

The Conner 40MB laptop drives you mentioned are notorious for problems. Most of them will power on, but the head won't move from resting position. A good whack on the side will fix it temporarily. Your best bet is to get one of the IBM-branded 2.5" drives.

Yeah, I would have gotten a bit more physical with it but as I mentioned, the SCSI chip is pretty mangled from someone's attempt at "repair". Those old 2.5" SCSI drives aren't too common (did anyone other than Apple use them?).

I think some other obscure laptops/notebooks did use 2.5" SCSI HDDs (a SPARC-based one rings a bell?)

Forgot to update -

Picked up a NextStation Turbo Mono with 32MB RAM, 480MB HDD, non-ADB keyboard and mouse. No monitor

Been cruising http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums

Wow!! The Force is strong with this one

I've wanted one for a long while and finally decided now was the time. I remember being completely taken in by the black boxes when my brother worked at csos.orst.edu in '91, '92, timeframe.

Nothing major but I found eight 32MB 72-pin FPM modules, an AppleDesign keyboard and a Power Computing ADB keyboard for $9 today.

Pitz is hooking me up with a NeXT monochrome monitor this week so I should be able to find out if my NeXTStation Turbo conquest will boot.

Geez, you are SO lucky! I'm never able to find anything, especially on Craigslist. I keep getting scammed even when the listing is legit looking.

Fished a 600MHz Graphite iMac G3 (60GB HDD, 256MB RAM) and a Performa 6205CD (1GB HDD, 40MB RAM) from the trash last weekend. Both work fine.

Found an old ThinkPad 365X in the trash today. I need to buy a power adapter to figure out if it is a 100MHz, 120MHz or 133MHz Pentium but outside of that it has 32MB RAM and a 6GB hard drive. Hello period-correct OpenStep machine!

Lucky.... it's virtually impossible to find computers in the trash here. They are either taken to the local eScrap place or taken by scrappers. Just 10 years ago I used to haul home TONS of computers in one night. One night I brought home 25 working desktops.

Today I made a re-conquest on an old, customed G3 B&W I gave to my sister years ago:



I took G4 side plastics, sweated the paint from their insides and scrapped them onto a B&W G3. Internally it is a 350MHz with 512MB RAM, a DVD burner and 20GB hard drive.

I also made claim to their old 20" iMac 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo with a failing X1600 GPU. I'll be trying to revive it by way of reflowing the GPU BGA.

Still waiting on my DC board for a 2.4GHz MacBook Pro I picked for $65.