Rabid turns to relics

After watching that show on the ABC about people who refuse to throw stuff away, Rabid has realised we are in reality a collector.

Now, that certainly sounds much more glamorous than hoarder, bower bird or even squirrel with its nutty implications.

The reason we’re prepared to wear the collector tag while rejecting the hoarder moniker is because we are also supremely selective. Rabid doesn’t stash any old junk in the back room; it has to be old computer junk, or at least some form of technology. Surely there are microcomputers in old electronic toasters. Surely.

There’s always a risk whenever one reveals something personal that the information will be misrepresented by the media. Well there’s always that risk if you are somebody worth reporting about in the media. Here at Rabid Reseller you only run the risk of being ridiculed by the nephew and his skater mates, but they do like to do it loudly and publicly while the shop is full of customers.

There aren’t too many occasions when we’re thankful for a lack of customers, but it didn’t make much difference, really, since the nephew is also pristinely patient.

After coming out of the closet, or at least the back room, and admitting our addiction to retaining any technology we can’t sell for a profit, and then enduring the barbs about the entire shop belonging in the last century, we hit on an idea to turn our obsession into a money spinner.

A quick trip to the hardware store for a spray can of appropriately coloured paint, which apparently can only be purchased by a responsible adult, which seemingly excludes skater-boy and his mates, and the transformation was complete.

Welcome to Rabid Relics. Every item in the store a pre-loved but still working example of the finest technology of its day.

We’ve got Amiga, Apple, TRS-80, Commodore PET, MITS Altair, Horizon S-100, Osborne and even an early IBM PC. We’ve got daisy wheel printers, dot matrix printers, line printers, NEC thimble printers, thermal printers and even an early HP ThinkJet. We’ve got card readers, card punches, teletypes, paper tape readers, and a high-speed twin-deck data cassette from an Alpha mini-computer.

We’ve got eight-inch floppies and 5.25 inch floppies in single-sided-single-density all the way to double-sided-quad-density.

We’ve also got blue screens, green screens, white screens, and a smattering of colour screens from vendors like Teleray, DEC, Link, Esprit, Wang and even a Lear Siegler ADM, which believe it or not stood for American Dream Machine. Nobody is quite sure what they were smoking to make them think a computer terminal could be dreamy, but hey, it was the 70’s and nobody inhaled.

We almost had a rare Banksia Wave SP56 Modem in the collection until we informed the nephew exactly how the shop is connected to the internet.

The new look shop certainly attracted the punters – you could hardly swing a skater without hitting another one. But, by the end of the month we’d torn down the sign and gone back to being plain old Rabid Resellers. That’s the problem with nostalgia. You can’t really let go of it even when the price is more than right.

Gotta go! Customers waiting!

hardware rabid reseller