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Unexpected rarities?

T

tezza

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 1, 2007
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4,731
Location
New Zealand
Hi,

I was just pondering on my "wanted" list and had a reflection I thought I'd share.

When I first started actively collecting a few months ago, I thought the ZX81 would be one of the first models I should be able to source, and for peanuts.

Actually (at least here in NZ) these models are turning out to be not only uncommon, but also expensive when they do appear. I've been outbid a couple of times because I've baulked at the price! It seems these "toy" computers have a bit of value now. They seem to go for about 50 or so US dollars here. I was expecting to pick them up for less than $20.

The irony is that I GAVE a boxed one away about 10 years ago. Oh well...

Anyone else been surprised at the rarity and expense of a particular vintage computer, once they started to look around for it?
 
What does the market generally pay for Amigas?

They seem to go quite cheaply and are quite common in New Zealand. I bought an Amiga 500 for about $35 US about two months ago. It came with all original manuals, a second disk drive, original software (and other software) and the 1MB expansion. It seemed to me to be a good deal, but maybe they are even cheaper elsewhere?

A lot of them appear here on the local auction site and most go for $20 US to $125 US depending on the particular Amiga model and what gets bundled with them.
 
Amiga 500's are cheap. Amiga 1200's are about twice as expensive. Amiga 3000's and 4000's in particular generally cash in a good deal of money, mostly because there are people still using these for daily work, so they're considered workhorses just as well as vintage computers.
 
Old IBM Compatibles are going that way, which is curious because the Macintosh machines are so easy to have so cheaply.

A local shop here in the Pac NW is selling an original IBM PC 5150 for $60.00, a few years ago, I saw them going for $10 $20 for the CPU only. The monitor is $50, I got a CGA 5153 for free a few years back. This machine is on E-bay right now, if it were not $100 that I don't have, i'd get it with the monitor and the keyboard as a collectable computer.

486 based machines are getting expensive too, heck, just the video cards, if you are going for a high-end one, are around $315.00 on E-bay, and often selling for $10-40 at other places. I see 486 systems up on E-bay for around $200 these days, at that price you could get a Pentium 4 with DOSBOX to do the same thing. It doesn't bother me, maybe I'll be able to make my retirement fund off all my old PCs when I get to that age.

It seems the least wanted PC stuff is the 80286, probably due to all the bad press about the lack of being able to use more than 1MB of RAM in DOS, and being unable to switch modes without the CPU being reset, and so on. And even then some of those get good money, particularly the IBM AT and Compaq Deskpro machines, as well as strange old 8086 based machines like the AT&T 3600 and the 80186 Tandy TRS-80 2000, which are understandable being as strange as they are.

The biggest surprise is the Tandy 1000 series. Those buggers are asking a lot more than they were a few years ago. A few years ago, it seemed everyone was trying to get rid of their 1000 series computer, now it seems like they have become very collectable, which is funny, because after looking back at the "computer hell" thread in the links section, there must have been tons of em' made because I have yet to see E-bay without a a Tandy 1000 on it, and I usually run across 1 Tandy 1000 item a year in my travels around the thrift stores, heck, I got a 1000 EX this year for about $5.00.
 
Show me a high end 486 video card that is SELLING for over $100. I think last year I grabbed some nice Diamond Viper, ATI mach 32, etc VLB cards for $8.

286 systems can use up to 16MB of RAM, my 286/20 has 4MB onboard. Mostly they are slow and nothing too new runs on them *everything was coded for 386 or better it seems). I have mine for old games.

Plenty of Tandy 1000's on ebay. I have a 1000 HX, the plus memory expansion cards are worth more then the system itself.

I think most of the old junk got recycled by now and there are people still looking for it so prices go up on the few items that change hands.

I never seen an Amiga 1200 in the US go for under $100. Considering a stock unit only has 2MB of ram and is a 68020 thats quite a bit.
 
Unknown_K said:
I never seen an Amiga 1200 in the US go for under $100. Considering a stock unit only has 2MB of ram and is a 68020 thats quite a bit.
Click to expand...

Well, you have to consider the following:
1) AGA Chipset
2) trapdoor upgradable (CPU/SCSI/RAM/YouNameIt), and clock-ports
3) PCMCIA slot for NIC card (cheaper than sourcing a Z2/Z3 ENET card)
4) AmigaDOS 3.x compatible (3.1/3.5/3.9)
5) Internal 2.5" IDE hard disk
6) nice aftermarket was avaialble - SCSI (Squirrel), IDe, etc...

It doesn't surprise me - you can pop in an 040/060 and render with it, or use it basically as you would a 4000, minus the actual slots. Of course, you could also go with the 3rd party tower/expansion cases, and take it to the 4000T level.


T
 
Speaking of which...

Speaking of which...

A couple of thoughts:

1. Who is that is asking truly astronomical prices for some not-yet-collected/collectable hardware on eBay, and why? There will often be whole strings of 20-30 items that are literally two orders of magnitude higher than the "going rate", as in the aforementioned > $300 486 video cards. These are not even high end ones, and I've been tracking them for almost six months now: NONE ever sell.

2. The '286 was truly the Edsel of it's day. No, it was worse. It was best used as a fast 8086/8088. Wait; scratch that. It was best not used at all. Programming it actually hurt. It was like a silicon push-me-pull-you.

3. (okay, a few thoughts) I think the reason the IBM's have appreciated so much recently is because the early users are now near the peak of their careers or at least no longer climbing quite as hard as they had to before. In other words, there are enough of them willing to pay more. This is of course only my personal experience, but when, say, the 512 Macs came out, none of the programmers or hardware hackers I knew had one; the only people who did tended to be well-off college students and some early graphics folks. My guess is that they simply didn't have the same "connection" to their machines, being more acquainted with the productivity software than the hardware itself. I've also noticed that it may be somewhat trendy for younger CEO's of tech companies to display a 5150 in their office with some completely romanticized story about how they bought it with their
paper route money (do the math as to how long their route would have to have been in 1981...)
 
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