Not having much luck with thrift shops last week, I gave another one a try. This time I visited the Goodwill ComputerWorks, a recent opening in Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood. Unlike the old South Side store, this one is located in the rear of a regular Goodwill store; you have to go past the clothes and housewares to find it.
My main goal was to find a replacement for my PowerBook 150, whose hard drive gave out on Thursday and whose screen has been dying for some time. (I do hope to recover the data on that hard drive by transplanting a head from another drive).
The results of the trip:
-No Apple laptops in sight. There were a few Windows laptops, some going back about 5-6 years.
-Lots of Power Macs from 1999-2001, including a ton of QuickSilvers.
-A few eMacs, none of which were in that great of shape cosmetically, and three Mac Minis.
-An entire aisle of Windows desktops
-A bunch of keyboards, mice, VGA monitors, printers (laser and inkjet), and internal components.
-A software selection with everything from a boxed copy of Windows NT Workstation to off-brand educational titles.
-Floppies, CD-Rs, Zip disks, and other removable media shared a shelf with some random video game stuff, including Play Stations for $10.
I was tempted by the NT but didn't spring for it since I already own Win2K. Part of me regrets that now, unfortunately. I did, however, spy a bunch of shrink-wrapped UltraKey 4s for a buck apiece. I snapped up six of them, thinking of using them with students who are taking keyboarding classes or simply need practice. Each disc also includes UltraKey 3, which will run on Macs as far back as the Plus.
The diskette selection was rather limited, as there were no DS/DDs. However, they had four boxes of 3M DS/HD, three of which came with 11 disks instead of the usual 10. I grabbed all four; each cost me a dollar.
For $10, not a bad day. The people at the store were also top-notch.
My main goal was to find a replacement for my PowerBook 150, whose hard drive gave out on Thursday and whose screen has been dying for some time. (I do hope to recover the data on that hard drive by transplanting a head from another drive).
The results of the trip:
-No Apple laptops in sight. There were a few Windows laptops, some going back about 5-6 years.
-Lots of Power Macs from 1999-2001, including a ton of QuickSilvers.
-A few eMacs, none of which were in that great of shape cosmetically, and three Mac Minis.
-An entire aisle of Windows desktops
-A bunch of keyboards, mice, VGA monitors, printers (laser and inkjet), and internal components.
-A software selection with everything from a boxed copy of Windows NT Workstation to off-brand educational titles.
-Floppies, CD-Rs, Zip disks, and other removable media shared a shelf with some random video game stuff, including Play Stations for $10.
I was tempted by the NT but didn't spring for it since I already own Win2K. Part of me regrets that now, unfortunately. I did, however, spy a bunch of shrink-wrapped UltraKey 4s for a buck apiece. I snapped up six of them, thinking of using them with students who are taking keyboarding classes or simply need practice. Each disc also includes UltraKey 3, which will run on Macs as far back as the Plus.
The diskette selection was rather limited, as there were no DS/DDs. However, they had four boxes of 3M DS/HD, three of which came with 11 disks instead of the usual 10. I grabbed all four; each cost me a dollar.
For $10, not a bad day. The people at the store were also top-notch.
