Sounds like I would have fun at that store if there was one by me.

Thinkpad 600 series are nice, have a few and one more on the way. The CMOS battery is cheap to replace, the HD sled is the same as found in the T2x,T3x,T4x series Thinkpads, just the cover plate is different. I have a stack of ZIP drives that fit in the removable cdrom bay if you want to trade for one. The only hard thing to find these days is a working main battery (have a new one in a box here somewhere I need to dig out), they have issues where they just stop working for no reason.