Be gone. Please be gone and drop this.
Posted on 05/31/2015 12:16:34 AM PDT by Swordmaker
MILPITAS (CBS/AP) — A recycling center in the Silicon Valley is looking for a woman who dropped off an old Apple computer that turned out to be a collectible item worth $200,000.
Victor Gichun of Clean Bay Area says the woman dropped off boxes of electronics that she had cleaned out from her garage after her husband died.
She didn’t want a tax receipt or leave her contact information, and it wasn’t until a few weeks later that workers at the recycling center opened the boxes to discover an Apple I (one) computer inside.
It was one of only about 200 first-generation Apple computers made in 1976.
Gichun sold the computer to a private collection, and he wants to split the proceeds with the mystery donor.
She could have taken it to the Pawn Star and got maybe $1000 for it. She could have taken it to Hardcore Pawn and got $100.
I'll sell you one. I have a few sitting around. I've collected vintage machines, often from recycling centers. A little bit of cleaning and replacing a part or two, and they work almost like new. There's a fellow selling boards for these machines that utilize USB sticks and CompactFlash cards. With that board, you can download thousands of programs, instantly turn on the Apple and play with it. There are still thousands of people involved in clubs and meets catering to these vintage machines.
He isn’t using the computer. It’s a valuable paper weight at this point.
$200,000 is cheap for an Apple 1. Recent machines have gone at auction for $700,000. What makes them valuable is whether they still operate, the amount and type of documents accompanying them, and if they still retain all original components. Of great value are the original chips, some of which are near impossible to attain. Some hobbyists scour vintage arcade sales because old arcade machines might have the same CPU chips as were available back in 1976. You can buy a replica Apple-1 as a bare motherboard, or kit or fully assembled probably for a few thousand dollars. But it will have modern-day components. I have one of the replicas. I regret passing up offers to buy originals in the past, as I thought the going price of about $1000 was too much as late as the early 1990s. Oh well.
Yes, the black case Apple IIe is a very desired item by collectors. Too bad you didn't fork over the $2! People don't realize that it isn't just the early Apple-1 that is desired. There are thousands of hobbyist collectors willing to pay big bucks for machines that other people discard thinking they are worthless. For instance, one of the last versions of the Apple IIe might have a hybrid IIgs motherboard installed with a special baseplate and rear ports. Very rare and commands big bucks. It's a IIgs inside a IIe case. Apple offered these upgrades to people but few had it done.
It’s not in a landfill. Its chemicals and metals aren’t leeching into groundwater. It is serving a purpose, just as much as a framed picture does, even if it’s just decorative. The goals of recycling are met.
I know of “rag mills” where clothes that people think are going to homeless and poor people are sold by the pound to high dollar “resale” retro clothing stores.
Fact is, it is not the intended audience.
Might as well have an ebay storefront (the kind of private business that says “we will list your items for you”) only don’t give credit or cash to the donors.
That is not recycling/recovery.
You have an idiosyncratic definition of recycling, and you completely misunderstand how charity works.
The point of donating goods to charity is to support the work of that charity. If you’re donating your old suits and last year’s fashions thinking they are going to homeless people, your lack of due diligence is on you. What homeless people need is clean, durable work-type clothes, but more than anything socks and underwear. The clothes you donate go into thrift stores to raise money for the charity. If they can make more money selling to hipster boutiques and rag mills, more power to them. If you don’t trust the charity to do the right thing with the money, donate to another charity.
“Rag mills” usually refer to places that shred the clothes and sell them as pulp to places that make high-end paper out of cotton and linen fibers. If you are offended that your stained, threadbare shirts are being sold by the ton for cash instead of worn by homeless people, you need to get over it and do your homework. And while we’re at it, the clothes you donate for earthquake victims in Haiti or starving people in Africa rarely get there. Cash is much more portable.
The point of recycling its make something useful out of something thrown away. Often that means reducing it to raw materials that can be reused. Sometimes (in Europe more than here) it means burning it to generate electricity. Sometimes it means cleaning it up and selling it on to someone else — there are companies that do nothing but repurpose computers that are a few years old, off-lease or out of date for businesses but still perfectly usable for home users.
The fact that you don’t consider this “recycling,” that you think it would be somehow preferable to destroy perfectly usable goods just so that you can say you did it, is your problem, not anyone else’s.
Charity is one thing, recycling is another.
Recycling is to reclaim raw materials from winding up in the city dump.
Charity to raise money for the less fortunate (through lifeturns or disaster). When Salvation Army sells higher end items online at auction, that still serves the mission statement. They aren’t claiming that all materials will be used by the needy. The receipts from the sales go to the needy (and even the very act of selling gives them some work).
This original apple computer in no way shape or form has been “recycled”.
You may think that is what happens but connected pickers go through them first and turn up $20 shirts they buy by the pound.
One thing that bothers me is that Goodwill and Salvation Army are very picky about what people can donate. They have often refused items because they're aren't brand new. I used to shop at Salvation Army back in the 1960s and they accepted all items, and put people to work repairing items. They no longer do that, maybe because there is more profit in simply accepting high quality goods. That's a shame because they used to put people to work and gave them skills.
I often donate electronics to recyclers, as well as buy products from them. Far better to reuse items than to accept the mentality of a throw-away society that wants only new stuff. Your thinking is wasteful.
Be gone. Please be gone and drop this.
I would expect that if you donate to, say, the Salvation Army, they go through and pick out the primo merchandise first before they sell the rest as fiber. If not, maybe they should be managing their assets better. They certainly seem to have plenty of shirts on the rack at the stores, so they're not shredding all of them.
I’ve seen those projects, interesting, but I don’t want a 1mhz 8-bit bare-board computer to play with. If I’m going to get a bare-board CPU, it’ll be a Raspberry Pi. :’)
I did buy one of Rich Dreher’s CF adapters for Apple II, works great, and I think he’s working on an Apple I version now.
I wholeheartedly agree — the main consideration for value in anything is scarcity, but obviously someone has to want the item or it’s basically worthless.
The earliest PC I used was the XT; the IT guy had the employer buy one, and he did all their database stuff on DBase, running everything out of that menu facility DBase had; and Sidekick was installed, along with very little else.
Before that he had an S-100 bus CP/M machine with a terminal (nice looking but I forget the brand) and an Okidata dotmatrix without true descenders. 8” floppy drives. I’m talkin’ style. ;’) Wish I had that now though, uh, although I’d have to add on to the house. Big sucker.
It’s part of the drive to push new hardware sales — the OS and other software revisions are not necessary at first, but only run fine on the newer faster stuff. That becomes an issue when the newer versions are needed for example online.
No, I won’t be gone and I won’t drop it. Self-righteous people come on a thread and mock people for giving new life to goods, and you get tangled up over PC words. You get over it. Not everyone wants a throw-away mentality; that’s what is causing landfills to get full. I learned from my parents about making best use of goods. They came out of the Depression appreciating any goods, whether they were hand-me-downs or not. Growing up, I and my four siblings had nothing that was new, it was all recycled by others giving them away or selling them cheap. I frequented Salvation Army as a teen to buy my own furniture. Back then, they would sell furniture for a couple dollars - literally. Did you think Cash for Clunkers was a good idea, destroying perfectly good automobiles?
I literally did NOT have the $2 at the time.That day I walked through the little flea market just for something to do for a few minutes and curiosity.Perhaps some here don’t know what it is like to find oneself with only 50cents and just enough gas to get to work until payday. I think the experience could do those in government and elsewhere a great deal of good.
Recycling in a sane world definitely includes the use of the item by another party.Your kind would deny poorer people secondhand ,perfectly usable items, in order to feel good about some hideously inefficient “recycling”.
Take your idiotic government/industry driven definitions and begone yourself.
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