VERAULT
Veteran Member
Well my Lisa 2/10 has an apple 1 mouse. Do you think maybe scavengers are just selling the mice separately as they gets $300+ for them and an apple ii/mac mouse is much easier to tind?
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WTB: Working Apple Lisa
- Thread starter classiccomputing
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NeXT
Veteran Member
Without a doubt. A Lisa mouse sits on a shelf perfectly like it's a Funko Pop.
Actually, now that I think about it the 2/5 would of probably sold with the original Lisa mouse as well, but a 2/5 is just a mid-revision Lisa.
Actually, now that I think about it the 2/5 would of probably sold with the original Lisa mouse as well, but a 2/5 is just a mid-revision Lisa.
falter
Veteran Member
There's a lot of 'nibble bidding' out there. I'm not sure if it's nefarious or just behavioral (probably both), but I noticed on a number of auctions I'd set a proxy bid of a little more than what the item went for last time, and like clockwork someone shows up and starts putting in little bids, sometimes dozens - starting and stopping over a course of days, like they're trying to jack up my bid. I've seen situations where these nibble bids do top mine, whether by design or accident I don't know. I don't bother to respond, and then many times a week after the auction closes the item is back up again. It does make me suspicious of sellers sometimes. But I've also seen how people can get emotional during auctions and do crazy, unaffordable things that lead to massive regret later, so it may be little more than other collectors getting a little crazy in the head when a rarish item pops up.
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I've got my first vintage compact mac (and never touched the Apple ecosystem before) and ... I see problems.
Cross-development for the C64 is made easy, there are multiple IDEs to work with and ready-made compiler + assembler + linker + emulation environments make hackers happy. Debugging through emulation is excellent. The platform is extremely well-documented.
Cross-development for DOS is made extremely easy. Open Watcom has everything you need, and DOSBox is hard to beat for convenience; if you don't like those, you have probably hundreds of alternatives. Debuggers are everywhere. Even native development is viable and exchanging data is easy. The platform is extremely well-documented. Developing for 16-bit Windows is a bigger ask, but still very possible.
Cross-development for System 6 or 7 is hard. There is Retro68, and that's about it. As far as I can tell, people tend to use native/vintage tools (which are not VCS and github-friendly), and their C code is not compatible with modern compilers (Pascal strings are not understood my any modern compiler). Data transfer is challenging, and emulation is limited. Documentation is mostly limited to books and a few recent blogs I found. The hardware isn't really well-documented, nor is it really exciting.
There is no good tooling, and little documentation. That's a huge barrier to get started.
I guess it's because this is a forum for vintage computers and the usefulness (or lack thereof) of any system should not matter whatsoever.
You know, there's that one guy owning a fully working Nintendo PlayStation. Can he do much with it? No, because not a single CD-ROM game exists for it (well, two exist, but have not leaked).
Even with the historical value aside, there is nothing wrong if people want such systems and are ready to pay a fortune for them.
Plasma
Veteran Member
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I think there are just some people who don't understand how ebay bidding works. They also feel they need to be "winning" during an auction and will drive the price up to remain on top. What I usually do is put in only the minimum bid (so I get reminders etc), even if it's immediately outbid via proxy. Then I snipe at the very end of the auction.
classiccomputing
Experienced Member
Thank you, and I hope you enjoy it. I welcome any comments, both constructively critical and praise.
You are probably correct in that the more attention any historical object (computer) receives, it drives more attention, affects supply/demand and prices go up.
falter
Veteran Member
I wonder if anyone has written any books or articles on the psychology of ebay auctions. It's really interesting to observe how people behave there. Like you'll have a Lisa for example being offered at $4k Buy it Now, which they sell for almost all day long, and nobody will touch it.. but then an auction will fly up to $5k. It's like people get emotionally invested in an auction... they don't like seeing the cost up front.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Anyone elses pulse really quicken when watching an auction (you buying or you selling doesnt matter)? I know mine does... Meaning there is some serious psychology involved.
cjs
Experienced Member
I suspect that this is a variation of the sunk cost fallacy, where people demonstrate ""a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made."
In this case, though you've not actually yet spent the money you've bid, and it costs you nothing financially if you don't win the auction, you have spent time examining the item and bidding already, so often it feels as if it would be a waste not to bid just a little more to win the auction when you've already bid so much anyway. Raising a bid by $10 feels far less "expensive" than shelling out $4000 in one go, probably because you've in your mind already "spent" the previous bid (even though you haven't).
Another thing that changes is that, without broader knowledge of the current market, an offer without bids doesn't give any information about the market value of an item because market value can be set only by a successful exchange. So is that $4000 Lisa sitting on Buy It Now really worth $4000? Probably not, or it would have been sold already. But once you're bidding against other people you have some very clear indicators of the value of the item. (You know the bids are serious because each bidder knows that he will have to buy the item at the price he's bid unless someone outbids him.)
And, related to both of the above, there's probably also a certain amount of anchoring effect going on there
On EBay, I set a price for something and I bid it. If it goes over, it goes over.
Was bidding on something the other day, not computer, and did that. Bids got bumped closer to my max price, and I wasn't outbid until the last half hour. Final price was almost $150 more than my bid. Wasn't going to board that train.
I don't know if they do, but EBay should extend the auction by 5m every time a new bid goes in with less than 5m left.
Was bidding on something the other day, not computer, and did that. Bids got bumped closer to my max price, and I wasn't outbid until the last half hour. Final price was almost $150 more than my bid. Wasn't going to board that train.
I don't know if they do, but EBay should extend the auction by 5m every time a new bid goes in with less than 5m left.
skate323k137
Experienced Member
IIRC there were sites that would do this, but IMO it also opens up worse opportunities for shill bidders.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Yeah I dont like that. Thats thats how those scam penny auction sites work.
falter
Veteran Member
I often wondered why ebay didn't do something like that - they'd certainly earn more money. I've seen numerous auctions where two bidders 'nuke' their bids (like bid $5000 on a $1000 item just to be sure to beat the snipe bids), and then the item has to get relisted again.
I used to just set my max and leave it but the nibble bidders unfortunately have rendered that strategy pointless. It's like they get angry when they see their $10 bid increase doesn't work, so they start bidding over and over again in small increments til they beat it, just out of spite. I recall one auction where I had my max at something like $1500, and this one bidder put in something like 80 bids before overcoming it. Over several days.
These days if I really want something I just use Gixen and snipe it - that way the nibble bidders don't know what hit them.
cjs
Experienced Member
Yahoo Auctions Japan still does extend the auction by 5 minutes if a winning bid is entered at less than 5 minutes to go, unless you specifically set the auction to have no extensions. Things do tend to go a bit crazy at the end from time to time, with extensions sometimes going for even an hour or more. Still, it's probably not doing a bad job at finding the market price, though perhaps a better way of doing it would be to allow any individual bidder only one bid in the last five minutes, so that they're forced to set the real price they're willing to go to.
twmiller
Experienced Member
Yeah, this is what I do, too. The trick is to be honest with yourself about how much you *really* want to spend on something, and make that your bid.
That's why I don't cross-develop. I use MPW, and I moved from MPW on a Mac SE/30 to MPW on a Power Mac G3 so I could use a bigger monitor on the G3.
When all is said and done, you've got to test on the real hardware, and cross-development only takes you an extra step away from the real hardware. Who cares if your software appears to work on some emulator? Only the hardware is definitive.
classiccomputing
Experienced Member
Thank you everyone, for all of the great discussion. I have two functional little "Lisa Raspberry Pi" computers, so I guess I'll just have to be satisfied with those for my Lisa experience. https://lisalist2.com/index.php?topic=66.0
Being able to use two screens (one for code, one for documentation), a good keyboard and syntax coloring definitely beats working on a monochrome 9" CRT screen. Fast save-compile-test runs and the ability to look up stuff easily are also convenient, especially when not familiar with the target system.
But the real deal for me is that most of the code doesn't care about the hardware - and can be tested outside as well. Being able to run the majority of the code through a modern compiler, and test it on a modern system is huge. Every compiler warning from gcc/clang is a potential bug, every warning shown by valgrind is a guaranteed problem, every segfault a potential week-long debugging hunt without memory protection. A 35-year old toolchain cannot match that. (And while I don't particularly care about C++23 or Rust, I sorely miss a few C99 features miss when unavailable.)
Most emulators are pretty accurate, but knowing their boundaries is important. But if some code does not use demo-grade trickery and still fails on some emulator, it most likely won't work on the real hardware, either.
Testing different configurations (e.g. 1 / 2 / 4 MB RAM or large file systems) is also a lot more enjoyable when setting them up does not require a taking apart brittle plastic and a special screwdriver. Otherwise you risk your code being good on your hardware only.
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