Modem down

Faithful readers know I go to lot of yard sales/flea markets/church sales etc. , Ad infinitum.

We lived off these sales for a year while I was between jobs and did quite well but it’s a lot more work than a full-time job. You do find bargains and lots of new stuff that is priced real low. If you know what you are looking for you can, as I mentioned, make some money but recently I think the bottom has dropped out of the market for a lot of categories. We were specializing in books, children’s books, most specifically what are known as “Series Books” – Nancy Drew is one example. A recent round of items we put up fetched far under what we paid so I guess we will wait and see if the prices come back up.

But we still go to the sales, out of habit I think sometimes, but the long-suffering wife also has a side project of putting together fund raising “Baskets” filled with dog stuff for her sister and her myriad doggy friends who have organizations and such that need them. The baskets are quite nice, stuffed with dog everything and the LSW works very hard to gather the stuff to stuff them with for cheap at the “fleas”. At some point I will document the building of one of the baskets.

I look for electronics and people watch. I don’t buy much but I do enjoy looking and marveling at what people think will sell (come on, NO one wants your USED cassette/VHS tapes) and what they think stuff will sell for.

Here is an example that stunned even me.

In case you have NO idea what you are looking at (and that would not surprise me in the least) that is a modem, the old kind that used to connect to a phone line (NOT DSL) and your computer so you could “log on” to the internet, which in those days pretty much meant AOL or a BBS.

This isn’t even a particularly fast modem, note that it says 288 which is 28.8 kilobits per second-as it says on the box you can get an online upgrade to 33.6.

Just for a little perspective, a cable modem now can do 30 Megabits per second – Kilo being thousand, mega being one million.

This nifty little piece of hardware would have been introduced in 1991-and would have been obsoleted by 1998 when the 56k units came out.

I must have a dozen or more modems in the attic. While none of them are new in the packaging like this one I can certainly vouch for them working when removed from service.

No way would I have the sack to put a price tag of any sort on them.