First of all, I know Sellam and he is my friend. Hopefully he got the really valuable stuff out, nothing on Ebay that I saw is that priceless, so I assume there is a core of the collection safe someplace. No proof to this but that's my instinct.
I know very few vintage computer collectors who have orderly collections. How safe is your collection? There needs to be room in this world for those who simply don't do everything perfectly to keep track of things, and it can get out of control, eh? It does not matter who is right legally, all that matters is that some schmo has a collection of vintage computers and has no idea what they represent, their historical value. This tvrsales does not know how to fix them, and does not know how to preserve them and keep them safe. Does not care about history. That's what hurts. The value of Sellam's collection comes from what it represents intrinsically/historically, not the items' scrap values, or their Ebay values.
Consider this - it's 1996 and Sellam takes the lead to define "vintage computers" as a hobby. He creates vintage.org, and he starts the Vintage Computer Festival. Read VCF 1.0 in 1997 web page, exciting time. Wish I was there at the first VCF.
http://www.vintage.org/vcf97/
Up to that point it was the "original" creators and historians who spoke about computer history. Historians did not need the computer itself, or know how to fix and preserve them. Sellam and Eric and Bruce Damer, Jay West, David Greelish, etc. adopted a new perspective. A living history of computers - to save and preserve them. To build a community of like-minded people who seek to share knowledge, hack the hardware and software, and keep them running.
We 3rd gen computer hackers, now in our 40's, were fascinated as kids with the original 70's stuff but were too young and too poor to have more than one computer. We had one computer *if* we were lucky.
SO - Imagine you're in California and it's 1996. Many computer users are finally abandoning their IBM PC's, Commodore 64, Amiga's, CP/M systems because they want to jump from the BBS's to the WWW. These people hate however to throw away their old machines, but they're taking up space. Sellam and others saw this as an opportunity. A perfect way to get computers that were considered meaningful technologically and historically - and for pennies on the dollar to their original cost. Sellam and others began publicizing their rescue and preserve services.
Sellam being in the right place and at the right time - boom - he accumulated the largest collection of vintage computers in the world before a lot of us even knew what "vintage computers" was. Back then old computers were a lot cheaper, there was no Ebay to drive up prices. I am sure Sellam did not expect to accumulate so much so fast. The concept of "vintage computers" was a new thing then and no one then imagined that it would be possible to have a warehouse full of computers when all your life you could only afford one system.
Perhaps one good thing will come from this, having too much stuff can be an albatross around your neck. Perhaps there is such a thing as too much stuff for one person to handle. Makes you think. They're just things anyway. Now Sellam can focus quality time on what's left, should the worst happen and he is not able to retrieve his items. His biggest accomplishment is not having the most computers, it's the fact that he is one of the people who helped establish the hobby. No one can ever take that from him.