20ohm20

My dad worked at GTE (and for a couple years, Verizon, which bought them) for 34 years. I vaguely remember seeing the GTE/Sylvania Intellivision offered in the Lakewood, CA employee store, but we never bought one. We did buy our TI-99/4A there along with at least two Sylvania branded TV's and a few phones.

My dad bought a //e in 1983 as a means of working remotely without having to make a 250 mile round trip drive once or twice a week. I wasn't really allowed to use it (I had a TI-99/4A, VIC-20, and C-64 at the time) but I remember playing Zork I on it occasionally. When the company bought him an IBM PC in 1986, he basically gave me the Apple //e, which I still have to this day: non-enhanced, 128k RAM/80 column card, DuoDrive, Apple Personal Modem, Imagewriter I printer, and an Apple monochrome monitor. All but the monitor (which kicked the bucket in the mid-90's) still works to this day.

Out of the roughly 500 5.25" disks I have, less than 10 of them have become unreadable over the years. And all but one or two of the disks that have gone bad were commercially released disks. The NOS Maxell and 3M 5.25" disks I bought in the early 2000's have all worked without issues as I've been opening and using them.

Zork I Zork II Planetfall Infidel I recently retrieved all of my old boxed C64 software, including Zork III and Suspended, which I never finished BITD. I'd like to finally finish them sometime this summer.

One bump before I buy a 3D printer and attempt to make one myself.

PM sent.

WTB: a 3D printed Atarimax SIO2PC serial case. Will pay for time, shipping, and materials. If you can do this please send me a message. Thanks!

May 2011: My first transaction was the following from a single person: a black Irish 2600 Jr. with a NTSC motherboard, two CX10's, two Sears heavy sixer driving controllers, and 21 "ugly" 2600 cartridges with missing labels, writing, excessively dirty, etc. (including three copies of Krull).

September 25, 1997

My dad bought our first VCR from the Federated in Cerritos, CA in 1980. I also bought Swordquest Fireworld and another game I can't remember from there on clearance ($4.99 each, IIRC) in '86 or '87. Shortly after that the store became another electronics store of some kind. By the mid-90's it became either a Circuit City or The Good Guys!

I bought a breadbin C64 off eBay almost 20 years ago that has the same style/color keyboard. The seller told me that it was a new/old stock Radio Shack replacement.

I seem to remember restoring the ladder logic for a customer that had a 5TI system a few years ago from my -3104 VPU. At least I remember the customer had their logic stored on one of those obscure format disks that I've never been able to find. Typically I had to restore the logic to the 5TI sequencer from hard copy with a handheld programmer that looks like a early 70's calculator. Edit: We had two VPU's and I might have used the other which has (I think) a standard double density floppy drive (and requires a operating system disk).

Starcade at Disneyland had many "older" games that I've never seen anywhere else. Most of them were still there (on the upper level where the queue for Space Mountain used to be adjacent) until at least 1992 or 1993. I remember Steeplechase, Drag Race, Shark Jaws, Stunt Cycle, and a cockpit Star Fire off the top of my head.

It's for programming the 5TI series of PLC's/sequencers. Shockingly, many companies still use 5TI systems to run assembly lines and machinery today. Apparently, I'm one of the few people in this country that still has the equipment and knowledge to work on these things.

I have two that I use currently: Tandy 1000EX: 8088 @ 4.77MHz, 640K RAM, Tandy graphics, 1 serial/1 parallel port (w/PLUS to ISA adapter), built in 360K 5.25" floppy drive, external 720K 3.5" floppy drive, XT-IDE w/32MB compact flash (w/PLUS to ISA adapter), Tandy CM-5 monitor, MS-DOS 3.2 Pentium-75 in generic, beige desktop case: 40MB RAM, generic Trident 4MB PCI VGA graphics, 2 serial/1 parallel port, 3Com 10MBPS ISA adapter, Sound Blaster 16 ISA, 800MB Quantum IDE hard drive, Toshiba IDE CD-ROM, 5.25" 1.2MB + 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drives, Viewsonic 17" VGA CRT monitor, Windows 95