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Old 25th Jan 2020, 5:38 pm   #55
TonyDuell
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Join Date: Jun 2015
Location: Biggin Hill, London, UK.
Posts: 5,191
Default Re: Very interesting auction of communications equipment

Quote:
Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler View Post
My eyes were opened to auctions at a farm displenishment sale when I first saw farmers bidding on old electric fence units and going over the price of a brand new one!

Since then I've found it a regular feature. Scots farmers running away with themselves.

I also notice that the auction firm doing these sales always has a bar on-site.

David
When the labs where my father worked closed down, he and I went to the (official) auction of surplus equipment.

There were certainly some bargains that I was interested in. A DEC MINC (data logger based on a PDP11/23 processor) went (to me) for £2 and it contained a couple of rare input modules. A lot of HP85 etc series computers. My first logic analyser. And so on.

But there were also a lot of surprising high prices. Old PCs (we are talking about 80286 or even 8088 machines in the mid 1990s) went for over £100 in many cases (and there were nothing obviously special about them). A bag of assorted boxes of woodscrews went for more than similar screws would cost new at Screwfix or the like.

Considering it was mostly dealers bidding there I do wonder what was going on....
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