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What was your greatest or wildest needle in a haystack poor score, or pick up?

Atari the Jedi

Atari the Jedi

Member
Joined
Sep 22, 2024
Messages
18
Location
Sparks, Nevada
So I'm hoping I can get myself a needle in a haystack pickup looking for a Corona (Cordata) portable machine and it got me thinking, I've had some really wonderful pickups when it comes to arcade and related machines.

The closest cool vintage computer pickup I've had is a few years ago picking up my Compaq 510 in the middle of a field as I was about to pee behind a bush. I almost peed on it I quickly grabbed it and scooped it into my car.

I'd like to hear about some other people's cool or even super wild pickups. To me that's half the fun getting those poor scores
 
I had a friend who escaped Romania under Ceausescu and a few weeks before I started working with him and one day I asked if he wanted to come to a salvage yard with me to look for lasers.

We went there, and as we left, he tripped over something in the dirt, and picking it up, he started shaking and tears ran from his eyes. He looked to me and back to the dirt-covered PCB, then back to me, and said, "Do you know what this is? It's a PDP-(something, something, something) PCB. I spent days of my last time in Romania fixing some of these before they let me leave, because they were so valuable, and here, I kick them in the dirt because to you they are just rubbish." then he starts pointing out what each chip did and which chips he had replaced on these boards. Finally after about a minute, his shaking subsided, and he tossed it over his shoulder like it was nothing now, and shook the remaining tears loose, suddenly realizing he was in a different world. It took him days to get over the incident, and he told pretty much everyone the story when we got back to the workshop.

No lasers that time, but we found a 3 foot long helium neon the next time, about 5 inches in diameter... A real monster. It could put a dot on the clouds some days.

I haven't had too many finds like that myself. I've had some good buys, but nothing amazing yet.
 
Not terribly impressive but I scored an AGP GeForce 6600 for $4 the week before last.

The story is the only real fun part. I went to an estate sale a few blocks from my house, not expecting much. in the back I found a whole closet full of big box PC games. A good find by itself; I got a stack of boxed games and an old Pentium II laptop at a very good price. I also picked up what appeared to be a decent NIB Creative Labs sound card.

Well I got home with my haul and started to go through it. Turns out an entirely different card was in the box, but I thought I remembered seeing the "correct" card in the close. I went back and while digging up the correct card out fell that AGP card. A 6600 isn't exactly earth-shattering, but it is the tail-end of the win98 era and I would sincerely like to have more good AGP cards in my inventory.
 
Sometime around 1998-2000, when 8-bit computers were still common in thrift shops, I found a Flat Panel Display for an Apple IIc for $15. That was a rare treasure even in those days.
 
It's been ages but I probably had 4 great hauls in my collecting life.

One was a local-ish IBM haul where I picked up a bunch of loaded PS/2 systems (model 65sx, couple 80's) plus boxes of MCA cards, motherboards, power supplies, accelerators and IBM WORM drives.

Another was when I was looking for a Quadra 950 PSU replacement and I drove an hour away to get a free one and ended up with a never used AWS95 with all options, a few Radius Rockets, a ton of boxed software, and misc stuff like stacks of 5.25" MO discs. Filled up my trunk and some of my back seat.

There was a guy in AZ that was moving and ditching his whole collection (take what you want, and the rest gets recycled) and I managed to get a 68kmla friend to go there since he was local and ship me a boxed Amiga 3000.

Don't recall how I found this one (probably an amiga newsgroup), but I snagged 50+ mint boxed Amiga games for something like $2-3 each in a huge lot (and shipping was media mail).

Way back when nobody was collecting you could basically fill up a warehouse of retro gear for free or next to nothing if you looked around and was willing to pick it up.
 
I've had 2 really great hauls.. these were both during covid-times and I was running ads and really building up my collection :) I paid $500 (individually) for both of these lots

commodorehaul.png

applehaul.png
 
So I had been on the hunt for a later Trinitron of agreeable size and price for a while. These have really shot up in price due to the retro gaming community, and so wasn't having a lot of luck finding one locally let alone a local one that wasn't hundreds upon hundreds of dollars. Even crap CRTs with horrible alignment problems seem to go for a hundred or more lately.

Well, I was specifically lamenting this to a homie I lived with at the time and was getting ready for a friend's birthday party. Walked out the front door and started the walk over. About halfway there I see a silver CRT sitting on someones front lawn with a free sign on it. Upon closer inspection, it wound up being exactly what I was looking for, a 20" Trinitron from around 2002-2003, KV-20FS100. I was ecstatic, the remote was even perched on top. Rather than continuing on to my friends party, I hoist the thing up and then waddle all the way home with it (luckily only like 4 or 5 blocks), set it down on the coffeetable, and hook up an N64 to it. Sure enough, Mario's beautiful stretchy face greets me not soon after and I see that the picture isn't crap either. I start to wonder why someone would put such a good TV out on the street for free, but then recall I've got a party to go to and run off.

Anywho, the TV becomes my main non-computer display (and still is) and I'm super stoked on it. There was a corner store right down the way from where I was living at the time, I'd go sometimes in the evening just to chitchat with whoever was working. Got to talking about the TV with one of the two folks that does nights and he mentions tossing out his old TV recently because he got a PS4 and it didn't work. Context is he was an older fellow that didn't really do much tech stuff, just liked to play his shooter games, and as it turns out he was indeed the guy that put the TV out, he held onto it all that time because it "just worked" and he was content with a PS3 for a long time. He had put it out that very same afternoon after buying and setting up some new LCD TV. After that I often mentioned how jazzed I was that I managed to pick that TV up, and he didn't seem miffed to find out how much people would pay for that sort of thing, he was just glad someone got it who appreciated it so specifically.
 
I got an Apple II with disk drive, disks, joystick, modem, memory expansion, 80 column card, manuals, etc.. totally free. I remember the guy giving it to me looked a bit depressed, like he was losing his only child.

Well I was pleased with my free Apple II and had plans - even got a super-rare replacement keyboard for it - but then it all got lost in a cross-country move. (damn those movers!) I kept thinking of the quote in "Lawrence of Arabia" - "It was written then."

("That that he lost was the Apple II he brought out of the Nefud.")
 
Oof. Yeah I only moved less than a mile and still managed to loose stuff. Nothing as big as an apple II though.
 
I'm a young hobbyist so I haven't found anything astronomically crazy yet, but I got my IBM 5155 with a hard drive, 640k ram, and a modem for only $330 off ebay. It was sold as not working, but the only problem was a single tantalum capacitor
 
My biggest might be a Mac SE/30 on local craigslist with original box, styrofoam, disks and paperwork + bunch of peripherals from an original owner. Not cheap, but 3 times cheaper than average "powers on, can't test" variety on ebay. Also did not need to make it suffer shipping. I count it as success.
Also had a PS/2 50z "not working for parts" cheaper than shipment costs. Needed only single cap replaced.
 
somehow forgot: a while back i got an rs/6000 off of ebay and had a good conversation with the guy i picked it up from (he was a mainframe software developer and was surprised that people were into them as hobbyists), eventually he got around to checking out my personal site and saw that i wanted a p/390, ended up getting the 128mb variant in a pc server 500 chassis for a few hundred, he just wanted to see it go to a good home
 
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