[BBLISA] used Sun buyers?

[Carl Alexander]

> ELI is still in business? Last I looked they were shut down. Or maybe
> that's just the storefront operation?

Sometime in the late 1990s ELI went from begnignly ignoring
walk-in customers on the used equipment side of the store to
being actively unpleasant to what they clearly thought of as
those scuzzy nerds distracting them from their high volume
corporate sales.  (I'd have thought they'd realize those
corporate sales are coming from people who were walk-ins five or
ten years earlier, but I guess not.  I heard several stories from
undergraduates who had gone there to see the legendary nirvana of
computer junk and left, never to return, feeling they'd been
treated with active hostility.)  Closing the storefront operation
was an obvious natural progression from this.

I stopped doing business with them for two or three years, then
decided to give them another try a couple of years ago when I
needed a third quote on some Cisco gear.  They turned out to be
the low bidder, so I bought the gear from them --- and then spent
several weeks going back and forth with them before I finally got
actually _working_ equipment. I haven't done any business with
them since.