XCSSA's Dallas First Saturday Trip, July 2001

First Saturday is the largest computer/electronic flea market in the US! A geek's dream come true! THE PLACE to SCORE cool, low cost, hard to find (or common) computer and electronics hardware! Tom's been attending it since 1990 and has got the XCSSA group love'n it!

Our user group tries to make it up about once/year. Some real sweetheart deals can be had.

Below are a few pics of our July 2001 trip that included (left to right) Jeremy, Tom, John, and Matt.



"The Event" begins at midnight, the friday night just before the first Saturday of each month. To get there when all the deals are hot, and it's still dark (around 2-3am) we leave San Antonio between 9-10pm Friday night.

As seen here, we have to keep ourselves entertained while getting pumped for the big event. An ad hoc Van-LAN keeps Matt and John occupied (in our sweet little rental mini-van) for most of the trip--while Tom and Jeremy drive and discuss Linux clustering technologies.

We didn't actually get a picture of the 1/4mi. square fair grounds, but we did manage to make it a priority to swing by Fry's Electronics while in the DFW area! Wow! What a place... It was all of our first time there!

After it was all said and done:

  • Tom scored a refurb 17" Black Viewsonic (w/speakers)=$105 and a new 10x CD/DVD ROM for $38, and a cool little 2"x1.5"x5" 35W +-5V/12V PSU for $1! :v)
  • Jeremy got the black-market-steal with his 21" Mag-I monitor for a mere $150(!!!)
  • John picked up a P100 server with integrated hot swap RAID w/drives and bays for a mere $60!
  • But Matt beat us all... He was able to snarf a dual PII server with 128M RAM, an integrated LSI SCSI bus, integrated AMI batt. backed RAID card (with hot swap back plane) and 5 SCA 4.5GB SCSI drives, w/redundant PSUs and CD-ROM for a mere $200(!!).. AND THEN snagged a 4 tape DDS(1) changer for $25! Wow! What luck!




    • After around 36 hours of haggling, driving, and geeking... we're a bit bushed!

    But Wow!


    Check out the SCHTUFFFFF!

    What a H-A-U-L !!

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    Email The XCSSA "Reverse Dictatorially Elected Coordinator" Thomas Weeks: tweeksjunk@theweeks.org