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Is our hobby starting to decline a bit?

Do you mean original ][s, not +/e? From where I sit, the straight ][ prices are getting sky-high.

Again, no, not from what I see. Our hobby is on the upswing.

Don't confuse interest with financial speculation. There are people who own horses and dogs who don't really like either. Wealthy people own vintage violins and don't play and can't stand classical music.
 
Is the market reaching a saturation point?

I think the market is a sliding window, and various points reach saturation as the window keeps sliding. For example, the sweet spot for vintage console gaming is the "collector is age 35-40" market: People who are approaching 40 are nostalgic for their youth and have the disposable income to collect it. And that target changes every few years.

Not that many people are interested in old video capture gear either, but I have a basement full of it.

You and I should hang out someday, play with our Zoran MJPEG chipsets ;-)

I find many collectors will spend money on hardware but will pirate all the software for that system (even games). So while gaming on old computer is popular the prices for most games are not that expensive anymore.

Agreed. The bottom has fallen out of most computing gaming software that used to command a high price because it was desired. Now, game software has to be truly scarse and in good condition to command three digits. When something has not yet been cracked and distributed, it commands $300 or more. My preservation group paid nearly that much to obtain Nightstalker, a game that had never been spread before 2015 until we bought and cracked it. (So if you've played the PC version of Mattel's 1982 game Nightstalker, you're welcome!) We don't do this very often due to limited funds, but hey, you do what you can.

The hobby could turn out like baseball cards, stamps, and comic books. The rare old originals people always wanted will be worth a mint while the common stuff will be worthless.

Comics seem to have been hit especially hard by this. Even before reprints, my Alan Moore Miracleman #1-#16 run was worth less than $100 starting around 2005. After reprints, I'm guessing they're worthless.
 
Pardon the elitist tones here but I think it's more your average Joe looking at just about any old x86 machine and saying it's vintage, which is excessively boring. You're running DOS on a pentium II. That's great, sweetie but nobody cares because you have the most uninteresting and generic PC that could of possibly been made. There's no special hardware or even any special software. Quit patting yourself on the back and get something that is actually impressive.
As for the prices these days I still think it's just salty old men who are finally sinking into the grave and want to get a few more dollars out of the crowd before he croaks. Basically the same thing that happened to ham radio over the last 30 years.

Also over the last few years a lot of youtube channels popped up that try and discuss old computers when really they should be taken behind the barn and shot for how awful their information is.

8-bit guy makes me want to punch children so goddamn much for some of the stupidity he's said.
 
There were people back in the 80's and 90's spewing baloney about hardware and software too.. some things don't change.

People running DOS on a P2 they pulled out of the garbage for free don't bother me, why should they pay $200 for a "proper" 286/386/486 to have some fun.

Computers and Phones for the last generation were like cars for my generation. Cars allowed me to get out of the house and explore the world, computers and phones let people who never leave the house or talk to real humans directly explore their world. So while I spend some cash on a 1982 Corvette that sits in my garage these guys can spend money for a Commodore C65 they don't use either.
 
You're running DOS on a pentium II. That's great, sweetie but nobody cares because you have the most uninteresting and generic PC that could of possibly been made. There's no special hardware or even any special software. Quit patting yourself on the back and get something that is actually impressive.

OMG thank you for voicing what I don't have the guts to.
I feel exactly the same way, and have to hold my tongue 99% of the time in various vintage groups.

Also over the last few years a lot of youtube channels popped up that try and discuss old computers when really they should be taken behind the barn and shot for how awful their information is.

I feel the same way, so strongly in fact that I started a channel for the purpose of making videos that are technically accurate. My scope is intentionally limited to the first decade of the IBM PC and compatibles, because that's the area most youtube channels don't cover properly (likely because DOSBox doesn't emulate that era of systems accurately and they can't be bothered to run real hardware). I will formerly advertise it when I have a handful of videos there I'm proud of, probably next year.

8-bit guy makes me want to punch children so goddamn much for some of the stupidity he's said.

He's aware of that, and has recently recruited a small group of people (of whom I am a part of) who advise him on the correctness of the technical content in his videos before they are published. I find that admirable; I don't think any other "youtubers" in that space are doing that, or want to be told that they're occasionally wrong. Hopefully he'll never produce another video from this point onward that is children-punchingly irritating.
 
8-bit guy makes me want to punch children so goddamn much for some of the stupidity he's said.

The only video of his that I've really taken issue with is where he claimed the Macintosh was Steve Jobs' biggest mistake and that Apple should have stuck with the Apple II line because the IIGS was more powerful than the Mac. :confused:

 
Take my earlier example of an original Apple II.. once upon a time wars were fought for them. Now, I couldn't get back half of what I paid.

Really? cause around here it seems if anyone sees a old computer with "Apple" on it they think its filled with gold bars inside or something. Even Macs have seemed to gone up recently.

Pardon the elitist tones here but I think it's more your average Joe looking at just about any old x86 machine and saying it's vintage, which is excessively boring. You're running DOS on a pentium II. That's great, sweetie but nobody cares because you have the most uninteresting and generic PC that could of possibly been made. There's no special hardware or even any special software. Quit patting yourself on the back and get something that is actually impressive.
As for the prices these days I still think it's just salty old men who are finally sinking into the grave and want to get a few more dollars out of the crowd before he croaks. Basically the same thing that happened to ham radio over the last 30 years.

Also over the last few years a lot of youtube channels popped up that try and discuss old computers when really they should be taken behind the barn and shot for how awful their information is.

8-bit guy makes me want to punch children so goddamn much for some of the stupidity he's said.

:( I made a PII that I thought was pretty rad.....multi changer CD drive, Voodoo II's in SLI with stealth coolers, Matrox M3D and a boring Matrox G200. plus an AWE64 gold with added RAM, SCSI hard drive.

I think I only watched 8 bit whatever once or twice. I make some pretty crappy YouTube videos as well and its hard to keep information straight sometimes, besides annotations YouTube doesn't make it easy to edit. Its why I prefer my blog sometimes cause as I learn what I messed up or am corrected I can silently edit the article and no one is the wiser......
 
The IIGs could have gone another generation with upgrades like more RAM, maybe a faster CPU, and built in HD. Would have sold well to the education market since it was cheaper then a limited compact Mac.

The 68000 equipped compact macs were pricey for what you got.
 
Pardon the elitist tones here but I think it's more your average Joe looking at just about any old x86 machine and saying it's vintage, which is excessively boring. You're running DOS on a pentium II. That's great, sweetie but nobody cares because you have the most uninteresting and generic PC that could of possibly been made. There's no special hardware or even any special software. Quit patting yourself on the back and get something that is actually impressive.
As for the prices these days I still think it's just salty old men who are finally sinking into the grave and want to get a few more dollars out of the crowd before he croaks. Basically the same thing that happened to ham radio over the last 30 years.

Also over the last few years a lot of youtube channels popped up that try and discuss old computers when really they should be taken behind the barn and shot for how awful their information is.

8-bit guy makes me want to punch children so goddamn much for some of the stupidity he's said.

You're like the guy with the 100% original classic car who looks down on anyone without the "correct" hose clamps under the hood. Most people get into vintage computing because it's fun and interesting. For some people, that's just playing DOS games on a Pentium II. Why would anyone care about "impressing" some elitist internet randos?
 
I find it fascinating how many people are interested in DOS machines right now, actually. Lots of young people too. One video that was posted of a PS/2 on youtube got hundreds of hits in a couple of days. And I've noticed on forums like reddit people react way more to 286/386 posts.

Personally I loved that time in computing.. upgrade your cpu and bam.. major change. Software revisions almost always brought major new features.

But I agree a little on hardware.. I have vintage 8086 to 486 stuff and rarely touch it. It's so easy to just fire up DOSbox.

Raises an interesting question though.. where is the cutoff for what can be considered vintage and worth collecting?
 
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You're like the guy with the 100% original classic car who looks down on anyone without the "correct" hose clamps under the hood. Most people get into vintage computing because it's fun and interesting. For some people, that's just playing DOS games on a Pentium II. Why would anyone care about "impressing" some elitist internet randos?

No, I don't think that's the right analogy. "Correct hose clamps" would be looking down on the person who ditched the factory-standard video card so it's no longer in stock configuration, for example. Rather, I think it's more like saying collecting (and driving) old Alfa Romeos is more interesting than collecting (and driving) old Nissan Sentras. Some people love Sentras, but they're a dime a dozen, and they're not the best the car industry had to offer then. The same is true here.
 
The IIGs could have gone another generation with upgrades like more RAM, maybe a faster CPU, and built in HD. Would have sold well to the education market since it was cheaper then a limited compact Mac.

The 68000 equipped compact macs were pricey for what you got.

Well, that was more of a John Sculley problem. As I recall the IIgs wasn't exactly a cheap machine either. I'm sure educational discounts made it affordable just.

We ended up with an Amiga instead of a IIgs due to the price.
 
No, I don't think that's the right analogy. "Correct hose clamps" would be looking down on the person who ditched the factory-standard video card so it's no longer in stock configuration, for example. Rather, I think it's more like saying collecting (and driving) old Alfa Romeos is more interesting than collecting (and driving) old Nissan Sentras. Some people love Sentras, but they're a dime a dozen, and they're not the best the car industry had to offer then. The same is true here.

Even so, you won't find Alfa owners joining a Nissan forum to bitch about how unimpressive their Sentras are.
 
Consider that most of the classic violins (e.g. Stradivarius and Amati) have been modified to play to current standards. Necks have been reinforced and strings are under higher tension than they were in the 17th century. The result is an instrument that is useful in contemporary settings.

So perhaps modifications not entirely period-appropriate are not out of the question for PCs.
 
Believe me, the outside of the machine might look pretty but so long as you never open them up you would never know some of the scary hacks I've done.

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Like hell I was about to pay something like $200 + shipping for a Tandy external hard drive. A piece of sheet metal and a cannibalized 5/12v wall wart will do fine! ;)

OMG thank you for voicing what I don't have the guts to. I feel exactly the same way, and have to hold my tongue 99% of the time in various vintage groups.
Like, I really want to state again that this sounds really bad and elitist but really, most people currently getting into retrocomputing are building or worse buying machines that simply suck. Like don't get me wrong there are still ways to make them into interesting machines (3D accelerators, specialty sound cards, RAID, oddball peripheral I/O and SCSI devices or even interesting cases like those riced things from the late 90's and early 00's) but even when you glance over to Vogons you see people bragging about some of the worse machines I've ever seen. Those ugly whiteboxes with the rounded edges so they're hard to stack, video cards which are visually the really budget things with some components simply not present, really really cheap sound cards from weird brands that used cloned chipsets or worse use the Vibra chipset, lousy ram, slow CPU's or CD drives that are absolutely filthy. Then while they might have a relatively fast CPU in them you drop DOS into it and after fighting with a VESA driver you call it done but lots of older applications don't work properly because you're trying to run on a 333mhz Celeron or the Cirrus Logic video card is struggling to properly do things in DOS when it's a 9x era card.

The only video of his that I've really taken issue with is where he claimed the Macintosh was Steve Jobs' biggest mistake and that Apple should have stuck with the Apple II line because the IIGS was more powerful than the Mac.
That is actually one of the videos that really really drove me nuts. Just stuff like how the IIgs had more expansion than the plus because it also had slots, but any IIgs user would immediately point out that unless you totally updated the ROMs you could not use both a card in the slot and the onboard device at the same time, plus slot 3 was still off limits to most devices.
Or how the IIgs could handle 8mb ram while the Plus could only do 4. Like sure that is true but if you needed all that ram back then either your program was handling massive datasets you should really be getting a different computer for or your programming was extremely inefficient.........or how he says the mac was black and white with no shades of grey, while in the video you can clearly see pixel dithering.

Okay, I'm done for now.
 
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