One of the things I’d like to do now that I have some real hosting for this domain is get some old content online that I’ve been intending to put up somewhere for years.
First thing to get the honor is a set of photos I took of a GRiD 1139 portable computer I owned until last year. I first got my hands on it back in… I think the late 90s? It was mixed in with a lot of surplus equipment my dad bought from the municipality at auction. It wasn’t of much interest to me at the time, but it was unusual enough that I kept it rather than let it be sent to the landfill (yeah, I know) with the other too old to be useful stuff that had accompanied the gear that my dad had actually been after.
It languished on a shelf for a long, long time in my room at my parents house. I briefly used the built in spreadsheet app on it to keep inventory for the student store at my high school. Then it went back into hibernation for a few more years. I dug it out again last year while I was cleaning out a bunch of my old stuff I’d left at my parent’s place when I left Anchorage to go to school in Portland. I was somewhat astonished to find it still worked. After messing around with it a bit I got to researching what exactly I had on my hands, and most importantly if it was actually worth anything.
Turns out, it was worth a lot. The 1139 has a number of characteristics that make it pretty collectible. It has unusual hardware (non-volatile bubble memory, an amber plasma display) wrapped in one of the first clamshell type portable cases (made of magnesium!) It also has some historical relevance, 1139s having been used on the space shuttles (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/doc.asp?c=900), and some pop culture exposure via the movie Aliens (http://forum.alienslegacy.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5410).
I put it, and some other less interesting GRiD machines, on eBay, and was pleasantly surprised to receive a high bid for the 1139 of around $400 from a collector in Austria. Prior to making the sale though, I indulged my curiosity and took the machine down to its bones to see what the guts looked like. The rest of the pictures from this exercise are below:
