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Do many people here manage to earn a living from their vintage computer hobby?

Lawrence Woodman

Lawrence Woodman

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 23, 2008
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152
Location
United Kingdom
From time to time I see people earning a living from their vintage computer hobby. Some write and sell games. Some repair old computers. Some even maintain legacy production systems. It must be great to be able to devote your time to your hobby.

I'm thinking of ways that I also could earn a living through my hobby. For me, the first stage has got to be writing a blog. After that, who knows? Maybe this is just a pipe dream, but I hope not.

I wonder if many people here have managed to turn their hobby into a career?
 
Lawrence Woodman said:
From time to time I see people earning a living from their vintage computer hobby. Some write and sell games. Some repair old computers. Some even maintain legacy production systems. It must be great to be able to devote your time to your hobby.

I'm thinking of ways that I also could earn a living through my hobby. For me, the first stage has got to be writing a blog. After that, who knows? Maybe this is just a pipe dream, but I hope not.

I wonder if many people here have managed to turn their hobby into a career?
Click to expand...

Are you reffering to the overpriced items on Ebay? Well... I collect just for fun, I don't plan to make a living. It is hard, btw, to make a living because of high shipping prices and not much interest.

Of course, if you got some truckloads of Altair 8800 stuff (or equalents) or some kind of gaming device of interest (The Atari Lynx for an example), you can problably mannage to make a living, but otherwise it's problably not easy.
 
frozenfire75i said:
I collect for fun, Not for money. I really don't think there is a big market for vintage computers, There is I bet only a few 1000 folks worldwide that would even give vintage computers the time of day!
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Yea.

It is generally more expenses than income in collecting old computers (I just paid about 60$ [25$ when excluding shipping] for a single TechRef for an early version of DOS).
 
If there are any people out there earning money on vintage systems it is the folks who maintain running ones!

A friend of mine knows innards of any PDP-11 like the back of his hand and earns big bucks supporting legacy systems. There is an amazing amount of legacy software still running in production today. Of course, most of it on emulated hardware.
 
wmmullaney said:
Really? What version of DOS? I got v5 ref for free.
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DOS 2.1 - 3.1

It's not that kind of TechRef that was shipped with DOS 5. The TechRef I have contains information about all the DOS INT 21h functions of the time, all the other DOS interupts, How the memory structure works, File Conrol Blocks, program headers, how to make device drivers, etc...
 
ziloo said:
Hi Pontus,

What kind of software are these and for what organizations?

ziloo
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One example is the local bus company that runs scheduling software on top of some emulated PDP-11.

Another is a Swedish car manufacturer that uses some emulated PDP to control older assembly lines.
 
I'm not making a living out of my hobby, but it's almost self financing right now. I buy plenty stuff in lots and keep the things I want and sell off the rest. Most often for a price that covers what I bought the whole lot for :)
 
I don't sell so its a loss, but I get great deals so its not a huge loss. I guess if I ever dumped it all I would get my money back (maybe).

This is a hobby not a business for me, but I do know of people locally who do make some money refubing older machines. I would think it is very hard to make any real money (can quit your day job) selling, seems like plenty of ebay sellers have quit or try to sell stuff at 10x what it used to go for.
 
Zeela said:
I'm not making a living out of my hobby, but it's almost self financing right now. I buy plenty stuff in lots and keep the things I want and sell off the rest. Most often for a price that covers what I bought the whole lot for :)
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The problem is, when you get a large lot of cool stuff, you always want to keep all of it, It's kinda hard to get rid of any.
 
Where's Druid in this thread?

I've been to his place: palatial mansion in the Knob Hill section of Hamilton surrounded by a wall made from old tower cases, gardeners toiling away in his formal gardens around sculptures made from old hard disk drive innards, Dru's Lamborghini and his wife's and mistress's Ferraris parked in the long circular driveway, etc. etc., all financed from his Radio Shack obsolete parts collection and the odd 386 MoBo...

Truly an inspiration to us all...
 
I make money writing articles and books about vintage computers and videogames, but it's sporadic and there's not much money in it. I work my primary, thankless job (presently as a technical/corporate writer) for my real income. Frankly the freelance writing is often more time than you can possibly hope to recoup in income, particularly when it comes to books. I know some people who make a living doing freelance writing or editing (in general, though some related to this discussion), but it's not a great life nor an especially profitable one.

I guess my suggestion would be establish yourself in a "real" job first, then devote what you can to making money from freelance or side projects and see if anything starts to take off. You'll be far better off that way if you ask me. You can still scratch that proverbial itch while not having to worry about money.
 
Same story as most over here. I'm a collector, given I want a museum for the public to get to see but it's all personal expense and honestly it's where most of my earnings throughout the year go.. in fact this year I'm living in the negatives for a change but need to cut back on other stuff soon (food, beer, liquor and other non-essentials).

I don't make money on it but that's because I'm usually collecting not selling. I've thought about it recently though due to pressure from a couple different sources. I could sell off some duplicates though right now it's nice to have them for fixing different systems for folks.
 
frozenfire75i said:
I collect for fun, Not for money. I really don't think there is a big market for vintage computers, There is I bet only a few 1000 folks worldwide that would even give vintage computers the time of day!
Click to expand...

The part-time job that I work at is at a brick & mortar video game store (not a franchise one like EB Games or GameStop) -- the funny thing is, some people do ask if we have any older games like for the Commodore 64 because we do stock older Nintendo NES & Atari 2600 games, which is why the question gets asked I suppose. Unfortunately they don't have anything like that, although I wish they did (!) I know of four other "regulars" who have told me directly they wish there was a store in town that carried some of the older computer games.

So I suppose that if anything, if you are running a video game store that deals enough with retro console games, I suppose it wouldn't be a bad idea to carry some older computers and games for those particular computers, just don't put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. I don't think having a store that deals exclusively with retro computers would be necessarily profitable, it would have to be something that is a "section" of its own in a store, at least based on what I've seen (and haven't seen!)
 
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MikeS said:
Where's Druid in this thread?

I've been to his place: palatial mansion in the Knob Hill section of Hamilton surrounded by a wall made from old tower cases, gardeners toiling away in his formal gardens around sculptures made from old hard disk drive innards, Dru's Lamborghini and his wife's and mistress's Ferraris parked in the long circular driveway, etc. etc., all financed from his Radio Shack obsolete parts collection and the odd 386 MoBo...

Truly an inspiration to us all...
Click to expand...

You forgot to mention the yacht moored in his private slip in the backyard...with a PDP-11 for an anchor.

--T
 
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