[Coco] 6 Chip 6809 Computer

[Bill Nobel]

Oh I definitely agree Gene, I’ve learned over the years to be very watchful. Especially with EBay, I see from other sources of people getting burned.

BillNobel

> On Mar 2, 2015, at 8:16 PM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Monday 02 March 2015 18:02:04 Tormod Volden wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 10:19 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
>>> On Monday 02 March 2015 16:01:52 Bill Nobel wrote:
>>>> Actually I had to go through a few sources I am going 6309 for my
>>>> build.  I found the CPU’s and the 68b50 on ebay, the Crystal,
>>>> max232 and 74LS00 from Mouser and the Ram & eprom from Futurlec.com
>>> 
>>> The last time I ordered anything from futurelec, I got burned on the
>>> exchange rate.  They advertise on the web page that the price is
>>> stated in USD, then they bill your COD at AUD, so I wound up paying
>>> almost $200 for 3 interface cards that advertised for $28 USD each. 
>>> Advertised as drivers included, yeah, for win-3.1 in some dialect of
>>> what I think was C, but it wasn't translatable by any compiler I
>>> had.  Even the cd's seemed not to be 100% iso9660 format.
>>> 
>>> Emails to them squawking about it were never answered. They had my
>>> money and thats all that counted.  I hope you don't get burned too
>>> Bill.
>> 
>> I have ordered from futurlec several times, paying with credit card,
>> without any payment trouble or surprises. The only problem is that
>> they can be really slow, and that parts are not in stock even if their
>> website says so. Once they sent me wrong parts, but as soon as I told
>> them they sent the right ones for free. I didn't know they offer COD,
>> anyway COD is always much more expensive, also since the courier
>> service will take its cut. I don't see how the exchange rate had
>> anything to do with it though, especially since 1 AUD is less than 1
>> USD.
>> 
>> Tormod
> 
> This was something in excess of 15 years ago, and the AUD was worth about 
> 0.88 USD at the time.  Those 3 I/O cards, with 3 80C55's on each one for 
> 72 I/O lines per card, with the COD charges, were to be shipped at 
> around $90 at the time I made the final click.  The COD was used because 
> they could not take a credit card from the US.
> 
> It took about 7 weeks to get here, and the COD was slightly less than 
> $200, so I had to go to the bank the next morning as I didn't have that 
> much cash on me. $193 is the figure that _seems_ to ring a bell. And I 
> never did actually use them in a machine as emc didn't have a driver for 
> that chip/card.  I spent a month writing one that could move a small 
> stepper at about 2 rpms.  Machinery needs 1500+.
> 
> Crying in my beer on the list, I got an offer from someone to write a 
> driver if I'd send him 2 of them, he would write the real time driver 
> and send me back 1 of the two with the driver.  So I did send two, never 
> saw nor heard from him again.  One of them may be laying around in the 
> vicinity of the pool table in the basement yet.  To me, 15+ years later, 
> it's a shrug, but I just wanted to tell others that they do indeed bear 
> watching.
> 
> Cheers, Gene Heskett
> -- 
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
> soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>>
> 
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