Druid6900
Veteran Member
While I can see making a killing once in a while you do realize that most of what you are doing is sinking time into gathering, testing, storing, etc a bunch of inventory that will be worthless to anybody outside the hobby in a few years. People who need parts for business will eventually upgrade so the 386 to P3's that sell now will end up being embedded boards or what have you in a few years making your inventory worthless.
The people who make money are allways the ones who get a customer to a product to make the sale (without having to get their hands dirty or keep inventory). Every factory you visit the sales guys drive the best cars (excluding the owner who has the exotic parked in his private spot) while the people who make things happen drive the junkers or normal boring cars.
When you specify to fellow collectors not to have more then 20% of their inventory being vintage, you are pretty much telling them to put all their hobby time into collecting boring materials to hopefully sell someday. Most collectors would be better off selling duplicates or items they no longer want to support their hobby then to turning the hobby into a poor paying job consuming their time and limited space (you are looking for hoarders after all).
No, actually, I'm not sinking time into doing anything. I make enough doing this to earn a decent living and I pay other people to do most of the testing and tear down and pay them as well.
You really have no idea the sheer volume of companies that, for whatever reason, are maintaining Legacy processes because they HAVE to. They are trapped in the hardware because of the software and they have nowhere to upgrade TO. They maintain it because it works and they need it.
I'll give you a couple of examples; Pan-Am Flight Simulator School in Utah buys whatever 20 MB FH hard drives I have because that's what their old simulators use and it's a hell of a lot cheaper to buy them than to start replacing simulators. A printing company in Wisconsin sent me a number of Tandy Model 4 computers to repair as backups for their working units which they do all their work with because that's the software they have and it works. An ice company in Ireland will buy all the Panasonic JU-257 floppy drives I can come up with that have the connectors on the opposite sides from the usual (yes, I didn't notice there were reversed connector drives either, until they got in touch with me and I went through all the 257s I had) because their control machines have rigid jack-in connectors and the equipment still does the job fine.
As for my inventory becoming useless, well, that isn't going to happen because newer equipment becomes Legacy and older Legacy equipment becomes Vintage and there will always be someone needing it. My inventory actually becomes MORE valuable as it sits around.