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Pet Prices!

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Pet Rescue

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 15, 2010
Messages
484
Location
Staffordshire, England
It does look nice and clean, but... wow, that seems excessive.

Of course, this is eBay. Get two desperate suckers into a bidding war and a ball of dried mucus can fetch £227.
 
Yes. Prices can fluctuate. An Apple IIGS went here recently for about $NZ1000 (about $US 810).


I'm inclined to think good looking, well maintained PETs are likely to become highly collectable items and hence fetch reasonably high prices. As far as appearence goes they are iconic of the early years of microcomputing. Also they have a claim to fame as being a Commodore product, hence a precursor to the very famous C64.

Tez
 
The randomness of some auctions is certainly puzzling but as Eudimorphodon (Firefox spell check suggests I should call him Dimorphism) pointed out bidding wars and the human brain are the anomaly in auction pricing :)

I try not to but also can get myself overbid on an item sometimes. Seems like anything I want always goes for much more than the common sold price, then after a while of hunting you end up tired of losing and bid higher. It's an early model though which I think could be some of the charm and Tez is also correct, it has one of the best vintage computer looks IMO that it's attractive to many collectors which drives up the value as well.

As for the IIgs systems in NZ, that's a teaser that I can't figure out ;-) I'm ready to start stock piling them and selling them over there I think. (kidding)
 
barythrin said:
... as Eudimorphodon (Firefox spell check suggests I should call him Dimorphism)...
Click to expand...

*snicker* Random trivia: "Eudimorphodon" translates to "true dimorphic teeth", referring to the fact that the animal had two clearly differentiated types of teeth, with several long fangs distributed around a mouth mostly filled with small multi-cusped "molars". (Extremely odd teeth for pterosaur, or even a reptile.) The "Eu", or "true" part is to distinguish the animal from the earlier-named "Dimorphodon" which had both short teeth and fangs but was otherwise less remarkable.

So... Firefox is semi-correct. It's picking a correct root word. ;^)

It's an early model though which I think could be some of the charm and Tez is also correct, it has one of the best vintage computer looks IMO that it's attractive to many collectors which drives up the value as well.
Click to expand...

That's the thing, though. A 4008 isn't really an early model; It's actually one of the last 9" PETs.

Eh. I suppose if you really needed "A PET" for a general computer collection or wanted one as a set piece or something... it does have the correct iconic shape/profile and that may be all that mattered. But as a precedent for "fairly" pricing a similar PET, well... it's all about what the market will bear at that particular instant.
 
Encouraging for those who have one that they're thinking of selling, and satisfyingly reassuring for those who paid substantially less for theirs ;-)
 
Could be that the dollar is just worthless these days so prices have to rise. Someday soon grandma's SS payment will be a box with old government surplus computer equipment from the 70's she will have to pawn for bread.

Actually I gave up trying to estimate what vintage equipment is worth, mostly I figure out what I want to pay and see if somebody agrees with me. Prices are all over the place, spike and drop regionaly, and have too few data points to get a real feel for current value.
 
That auction makes me want to sell mine. I've got a older one with white screen and white keys on the cassette drive.
(And if I put it up for auction, it would go for under 100 knowing my luck.)


1025.01 and counting...... wow...


Later,
dabone
 
It looks like there are three people out there that want that PET *very* badly. Wow. I guess I should tell the guy I gave the 2001-8 from Albany Computer Services to that if he's short on cash...

(It's the same bloody model/vintage. Heck, after he cleaned it up I think the warehouse dump-sourced one looks better.)
 
On the other hand, the lightning rarely strikes at the same place twice. Or so they say. Sometimes an item sold for a lot on eBay can stir up interest in a subsequent identical item, but just as often the 2nd and 3rd highest bidders suddenly have no interest in another item of the same kind. Perhaps some people bid as a sport; they will pay if they win but not really eager to pay that much for another item.
 
Pet Rescue said:
Well I've just watched an ebay auction and was really surprised at the price of a 4008 pet.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110728232265&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1423.l2649&autorefresh=true

Am I missing something or is it a special or rare model!

I watch ebay auctions quite regularly and would have expected £30-£80 generally but not £227.

If it was a chicklet model then yes it would not have been out of the ordinary to me.
Click to expand...

Actually the 4008 is rare compared with the 4016 and 4032. At least in the usa.
 
Good point. At the time of the 4000 series, no matter which motherboard and monitor they were based on, most customers probably would be asking for the 16K or 32K models. I don't know off-hand how much difference in retail price there was between 8K, 16K and 32K versions around then (circa 1979?) but as most customers would be businesses anyway, they would be required to buy as advanced computer as the software they desired to run would require.

Of course today if you want a PET to use rather than collect (after all, they tend to take quite some space if you're only into it for the sake of collecting every possible model), a 4008 might seem inferior to a 4032.
 
That could explain the higher price then, especially if a collector is trying to obtain the full series of 4000 models.

I don't know if many collectors do that but it could be a possibility.

I would like a chicklet model pet and then that is definitely the last pet I am collecting, well apart from an educator 64 if you can class that as a pet (4064).

That's what I'm telling myself anyway!:D
 
Hm, I have both a broken 8296D minus floppy drives and keyboard, and a broken 710 minus keyboard in the basement. Perhaps I should devote more of my spare time trying to fix those up as far as possible and then sell. They're bastards to ship though; I have shipped about a dozen equal sized PETs around Europe and although most turned up in one piece, I would need to improve my packing skills to send one more at those prices.
 
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