I did go to the sale in Naperville that was discussed in the other thread. There was indeed a Motorola Quasar there. It was one of the very few TV's on display that was actually for sale. They wanted $25 for it and it was half off day on Sunday. Its the hybrid Quasar II. Its a 1971 model and its in really nice shape. The thing works too, bright picture so the instant on must have been disabled or else it was never plugged in.
I also found a promotional Zenith coffee mug that showed some pictures of some of their mile stone TV's up through 1982.
There were also about 300+ vintage books on television, radio and computers. Nothing was newer than about 1975, even the computer books, and there were many of them were all based on the old main frame networks, punch cards, relay logic etc. It was a nice array of both servicing/repair and engineering. What made this such a good lot was the fact that it appears that practially every book ever published on color TV from the 50's-70's was in this lot. Tons of good books there, I liked every one of them and nobody was buying them. The shelf had a tag "all books $2.00 each" Under that there was a little note "ask about bulk purchasing for a better deal" There were like 6 shelves like the one you see with all these books.
Considering that I was so impressed with all those books, I wanted all of them to add to my technical library of obsolete technology, but I wasn't prepaired to pay $1.00 at half price per book as that would have still gone way over my budget. So I asked the guy at the sale if they would give me a deal if I buy all the books. He goes "make us an offer if you want them all, we gotta get this stuff out of here". So I said how about $50 for all of them? "Sure no problem, take them, get them out of here, they're yours" Then he goes "the guy we're selling this for will be pissed Im letting them go for this cheap, but he told us to clear everything out by the last day and do what it takes" So I loaded up about 7 decent sized boxes with these books and had a nice load on my truck.
I come to find out that the guy was still alive and he had a family owned lumber company in Chicago that has been in business since 1895. The guy was 63, he inherited the company after his father died and according to one of the people running the sale "he just pissed away the family fortune on this old electronic crap and now the company is out of business and the guy has to sell everything off and he is moving to Michigan"
This house in naperville was huge. You could tell he HAD money thats for sure, but he was not into the family business at all.
As for the CTC-16 roundie, I got to see his "private stash" that one of the sales people showed me in the back room that was off limits. It was nothing special, just a '64 model CTC-16 and it was beat to hell, tons of scratches and gouges on top of the cabinet.
Other than the 16 and this quasar, everything else was black and white and the only other TV that was forsale was about a 1957 RCA B+W console. He had a predicta and some DuMonts but none were for sale.
