One of my fellow vintage computer collector friends posted a listing on the Free Geek Twin Cities Discord server in the "Swap Meet" channel about a lot of Vintage Computers posted on Facebook Marketplace. There were eight computers, mostly Apple IIs of various vintages, untested but priced to sell quickly. I had some free time on that day and so I immediately jumped on the post. It's always a pleasant surprise when I'm first in line since so many folks are interested in vintage computers. I went down within a couple of hours and met seller for the pickup, he had been a huge fan of Apple computers back in the day. He had collected these machines from the University of Minnesota when they got retired from the computer labs. He is still involved with software too this day and he was glad to hear that these would be moved to other homes.
This is the third lot I've gotten this year, I already blogged about
the first lot here. I only have one repair left from that lot, a pair of Macintosh 512K machines. That will be a more complicated repair because
servicing the 400K drives is difficult, but I know how to do that now so I expect to be able to bring the drives back to working order. All the other machines from that lot have been fixed up and resold already.
The second lot had three machines in it but only one I wanted to keep, a Macintosh Quadra 650. I installed a BlueSCSI in that machine and it's back in good running order. I still have some big box software but the other two machines (a Macintosh Plus and a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver) have sold and much of the boxed software was donated to Free Geek.
When I got this lot home I was faced with a pile of incoming material to process...
The lot included an original Apple II from 1980, four Apple IIe machines, two green screen monitors for those machines, two Apple IIcs with two CRTs, and a NextStation w/ Keyboard and Mouse (but no monitor). On the first pass through these machines I had the following results:
The original Apple II is booting and running, but the video is rolling. Since this is a machine that I want to keep I set this machine aside for a future repair.
Of the four Apple IIe one just worked with some basic cleaning and testing and one with a DuoDisk only needed a new cable, which are
avaliable online from this vendor. I've already sold those two Apple IIe machines, but I have two more which power up with garbage characters on the screen so that will be a future repair. I've repaired multiple Apple IIes in the past so I'm looking forward to that repair.
Of the two Apple IIc machines only one was complete. Neither showed signs of life. The incomplete machine is an early revision which
matches the Apple IIc I already have so I'll keep it as a parts machine. The second Apple IIc didn't work right away but I took it all apart and cleaned and inspected it. While I was re-assembling it I put deoxit on all the connectors and after that it came back to life. I ordered a
3rd party power supply to make this a complete listing and it sold. I also had made a bunch of DOS boot disks and Flapple Bird floppy disks so that I could include software with the Apple IIs as I've been selling them, it's really nice to be able to set people up with a functioning system.
Finally, the NextStation. These can not be tested without Next hardware as the connectors are proprietary. I am fortunate to have a complete NextStation setup, so I was able to setup and test this machine. The Keyboard and Mouse were both working, but I had some trouble with the NextStation itself. I had forgotten that this machine will not boot at all if the clock battery is dead. When I moved the good battery over to the new NextStation it booted right up! I ordered another new battery to replace the dead one. It may come as no surprise that the Quantum SCSI HDD was dead so I installed a BlueSCSI V2 into the machine and got NextStep 3.3 installed and booting on that. I'll be holding on to this machine at least for now.
It's been fun to meet the people who buy these machines. We have some interesting conversations and I get to hear about their experiences with machines like this, and their plans for their new acquisitions. I've had a couple of repeat customers and even made friends with some of the buyers. So as I complete a few more of these repairs I look forward to helping people expand their collection while I build my own.
Let me know if you have a lot of retro computers to sell, or if you have memories of using these machines, or have been helped by my repair experiences. You can comment below or reach out via email with the contact information in my profile.
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