Just before the weekend I decided that I needed to fill a hole in my computer museum/junk pile, namely a Commodore Amiga of some kind. I’d looked on eBay to see what was available before asking on the Junk mailing list what people thought was the best sort of machine to get.

The general reaction from Junk was that the A1200 was super-dooper, but I also got an offer of a free A500 with lots of disks. Unfortunately, Jane hadn’t realised that Bob had taken the machine (and left the boxes) previously. Oh well.

The upshot was that this morning I had a look at what was available on eBay and found an A1200 on sale with about 10 hours to go until the end of the auction and the current bid was £14.00. Hence, I bid £14.50. It wasn’t long until my bid was overwhelmed. I had a further think and bumped up my bid and added a maximum bid of £20.00.

All was fine, with no other bids ’til about 5pm when another person pushed the price right up to my previous limit. Now, I wasn’t going to spend more than £40 including postage for any old machine, so I upped my max bid to £25. With less than 2 hours to go the bids bounced up to £24.01… where it stayed. I won!

Paying with PayPal wasn’t too much of a headache other than the unexpected delay between the e-mails confirming operations and the display on eBay changing. It make you think that you may have made a mistake.

Of course, now I need to wait to see if the machine turns up.

So far, then, it seems a relatively painless process.