Date   : Tue, 08 May 2012 16:15:27 -0500
From   : jules.richardson99@... (Jules Richardson)
Subject: Free Acorn kit - needs to go urgently

On 05/06/2012 03:32 PM, John Kortink wrote:
>
> On Sun, 06 May 2012 17:22:46 +0100, "J.G.Harston"<jgh@...>
> wrote:
>
>> John Kortink wrote:
>>> I always wondered who would have the biggest one (pile of
>>> Acorn stuff, that is). You know, filling an entire room,
>>> 'up to the ceiling' kind of stuff.
>>
>> Ermmm.... http://pics.mdfs.net/2005/02/050209.htm
>> That was part of the "free acorn stuff" I gave away
>> two years ago when briefly moving to Scotland.
>
> There are a couple of impressive stacks there, yes. But
> the rest is rather hard to identify as an actual 'room
> full of Acorn stuff'.

Mine was always split all over the place, so it wasn't possible to see the 
volume :-) I know I had over 50 Acorn machines (not counting copros and 
other add-ons) at one point, plus a handful of Torch systems (with the beeb 
as the I/O processor) and Control Universal (System-bus) machines.

It was a reasonably sane collection - in as much as these things ever are - 
in that I didn't actually have a lot of duplicates, and my only nod toward 
being picky about serial numbers / versions was in keeping an ICL-built 
issue 2 beeb alongside everything else.

I thinned it out a lot when I moved to the US of course - no way did I want 
to ship all of that - and it's been in storage back in the UK since then 
awaiting an opportunity to move it across the Pond. I probably kept about 
ten machines, plus interesting copros, internal boards etc.

> There was this guy on Ebay that bought almost everything a
> few years back (maybe still, I don't know), whose collection
> I would not mind having a peek at. He seemed to buy heaps of
> games and a couple of model Bs almost every week, I think.
> For years on end. He must have had a spare wing in his house
> to store it all ... I understood, talking to someone else,
> that he was retired.

Makes me wonder if he was scrapping a lot of the hardware for 'useful 
parts' to resell; I doubt there's much metal value in a beeb, but if you 
can buy one for a couple of quid and then sell the PSU, keyboard, ROMs, 
VIAs etc. all separately then I suppose it makes a bit of cash - perhaps OK 
as spending money for a retired person.

Mind you, I've no idea what he might have been doing with the games...

cheers

Jules