When I was younger, I used to spend most of my time wandering around and visitng garage sales, computer shops, and toy shops. I started when I left my 486-DX2-66Mhz PC-IBM compatible For an astonishing PenitumII-233Mhz equipped with a 3DFX Vodoo card!!! The guy of the computer shop who delivered me the computer said "I tested it with Tomb Rider" (It had just been published at the time)... "No contest!!". He had never mounted that video card before. I was the first to request one (3dfx released its Voodoo Graphic cards ath the end of the previous year). I had a powerful P2, but still continued at playing with my old 486... While the new generation of computers and consoles was growing, I could find a lot of old games for few money... In the toy shops I could find old NES and SEGA games, in the computer shops I could find old Commodore and Spektrum cassettes and disks in clearance sale. In that period I used to ask to the owners if thay still had old stuff on their store shelves. Sometimes some of them used to say "wait a moment, let me give a look in the storage room...". If I was lucky, sometimes the owner used to come to me and say, follow me... wow... In the back of the whareouse, hidden in some boxes or on forgotten shelves, covered of dust, sometimes I could access real treasures. In that period I bougut for few money a lot of hw and sw that nobody wanted anymore, because obsolete, but now they are real relics. To be honest, also happened to recover some machines from the dumpster. I found a working IBM machine there!! Sometimes friend of mine called me to recover old computers of their parents and relatives in their garages. I was really happy to do that! My favourite visit was to the thrift shops and stores that used to sell second-hand items... you could find everything there! It was like a surprise box. Once, for the equivalent of less than 20$ I bought a full working Amiga2000 with a C=1048 monitor and 2 boxes of accessories: optic pen, adapters, mice, joysticks and pads, tons of floppies... I was actually a relic hunter! During almost 30 years, I have collected evrey kind of computing device: from abaci, to mechanical calculators, from hand-calculators to gaming consoles. Some of my finds, are really rare. Hence, the aim of this section is to show you some of them and provide you some information, expecially if there is scarce information about those items on the web. In the lasat years, it has become hard to find relics... vintage computing has become popular, and fairs where once you could buy a lot of stuff with few money nowaday seem jewelry stores! People think an item it's worth just because it's old! They are killing the collecting and the activity of collectors that do that for passion. Anyway, sometimes you can still find something interesting. And if you don't expect it, when it happens is still more surprising... when you find a relic!
