I climbed down and Cindy would then send 5 boxes. "I would climb up the staging into the loft door and gather 4 stacks of 5 computers. To get an idea of how many that is, check out this excerpt from a journal he has kept while selling the ancient PCs. Pellegrini told Motherboard that he had sold about 560 NABU machines in the last seven months, or just over a quarter of his supply. He continues adding eBay listings in batches as people snatch them up. He has since boosted the price to $100 because of the high demand. Pellegrini did unbox them as they sold to ensure they would boot, but other than that, the computers were straight from the factory. Not only was he found to be the owner, but the devices were practically brand new and in the original packaging. Surprisingly enthusiasts started snapping them up to such an extent that eBay temporarily suspended Pellegrini's account to verify that he owned all these computers flooding the marketplace. Unsure what else to do with the computers, Pellegrini began selling them on Craigslist for $20 each, but interest was so high that he switched to eBay and bumped the price to $60 apiece. The machines sat in his barn for 20 years until the building became too old to house the electronics safely. Pellegrini intended to use the chips to build a telephone exchange system, but the project ultimately was too ambitious. Early arcade machines like Pac-Man and home consoles like the ColecoVision also used the 8-bit chips. It was famously featured as a second, but rarely used, processor in the Commodore 128. You may recall the Zilog Z80 as being used in various early PC systems, including the Osborne I, Sinclair ZX80, and TRS-80. He originally bought them in the 1990s for the Z80 processors they contained. Retired computer designer James Pellegrini has had 2,200 NABU computers sitting in his barn for the last 20 years. The influx of these dinosaur computing devices comes from one man in Massachusetts. However, a resurgence of the defunct company's PCs is currently sweeping the retro computing community thanks to hundreds of the 40-year-old machines flooding eBay. Until recently, virtually everyone had forgotten about it. It was a Canadian computer company dating back to 1982 that went bankrupt in 1985. Chances are that even if you are an old computing geezer like myself, you've never heard of Natural Access to Bi-directional Utilities (NABU Network), otherwise shortened to NABU.
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