Saturday, July 13, 2013

Ephemera...

Went to the Indy Hamfest with Bobbi today.

The sellers there are interesting to me as a non radio nerd. Half of them are guys doing this as a business and the other half are guys who have cleaned out their man-caves with shovels and hung price tags on the debris.

Lots of fairly recent electronic flotam and jetsam. One guy had a bunch of iPAQs for $3 each. (When Marko got one back in late '00 or early '01, we called it the "GeekMaster 2000"...)

As someone who once gave real money for a Canon AE-1 Program, it was interesting to see the bin that had a bunch of 35mm camera bodies in it included a T50 and a T70 for $4 each.

I passed on the Mac Performa 6400 and the Mirror Drive Door G4 tower, although the LNIB C64C was tempting.

Bobbi picked up some stuff that I would no doubt find cool if I knew what it was.

Also, there was a purchase which will get a post on The Arms Room!
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9 comments:

drjim said...

Bug her to post about it on the Retrotechnologist blog.

10:19 PM, July 13, 2013
Unknown said...

I have GOT to go to one of those.

10:35 PM, July 13, 2013
Mike_C said...

As someone who once gave real money for a Canon AE-1 Program

Heck, a few weeks ago I paid real money (not all that much, but still) for a black Canon FTbN. It will live next to the chrome FTb (non-N) and the other FD-mount gear. Never did cotton to the T50 or T70, but the T90 feels good in the hand and is a fine shooter. Even if the slopey-prism Coliani design is butt-ugly.

So did you buy an IPAQ for the hell of it? Though for true nerd cred you have to have one of those tiny HP programmables the name of which I forget (200LX?).

I remember the exact moment I realized I did not have the right attitude for proper nerdhood. I walked in on an excited conversation between a bunch of MIT undergrads on how you could send in your HP calculator* to get it overclocked. All present were very excited. I asked how many of them had programmable calculators. None. Seeing as the devices already give you answers as fast as you can type, why on earth would you want it overclocked for $80 (back when that was real money), I asked. Universal looks of disdain.

*HP calculators were de rigeur. Only idiots would use standard notation (like 3 x 4 = ?). Real people used calculators with reverse Polish notation (3, enter; 4 enter; x) "because the stack!"

10:51 PM, July 13, 2013
Scott J said...

iPAQ, I got one for Christmas 2001.

It was the first time my wife had managed to get me a relatively expensive present without me knowing about it.

I had been making "I wants it" noises for months and knowing our budget was resigned to not getting one any time soon.

I was very surprised and pleased.

I eventually replaced it with a first gen Windows phone (Samsung Blackjack) which paved the way to the Nokia Lumia 900 from which I do about 90% of my reading of and commenting on VFTP.

11:18 PM, July 13, 2013
Buzz said...

So, Mike, do you want to borrow my 28S or 48Gx?

11:33 PM, July 13, 2013
Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

Sorry I missed y'all.

7:16 AM, July 14, 2013
J.R.Shirley said...

$3 iPAC? Why not?

10:04 AM, July 14, 2013
Mike_C said...

So, Mike, do you want to borrow my 28S or 48Gx?

Heh. Thanks, Buzz, but I was a knuckle-dragging owner of a Sharp (or Casio, I forget) calculator using infix notation. RPN slows me down because my brain is too small.

1:22 PM, July 14, 2013
Stretch said...

Local high school photo class students were using Nikon F-1s. When asked they said "We pull what ever we want out of the box."
"The Box" is full of donated cameras. Stuff I never could have afforded when new.

2:51 PM, July 14, 2013

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