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(From cctalk) "Tech Pickers" TV show looking for cast

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barythrin

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Steve Stengel's post on cctalk a few weeks ago. I'm not in to traveling around the country low balling collectors and widows but if that's your thing ;-) (nothing wrong with business I guess.. obviously "I'm doing it wrong") and you're an interesting person to listen to perhaps check this contact out.
 
Oh cool, a television series dedicated to cherry pickers and people who want too much money/overvalue for computers.

This boxed Commodore 64 is an amazing example of american innovation in the early 80's and it even comes with a printer. I can probably buy it off him for $20 and sell it on the open market for $200.
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My initial thought is that, were I retired or unemployed, it would be pretty fun to do. But lowballing widows who are expecting thousands for their trash is not exactly my idea of ethical behavior. Besides, I'd probably get very frustrated by all of the "just do it this way for the dumb audience" concessions made during production (meaning, blatant historical inaccuracies, and all of the usual reality tv lies like out-of-order editing, etc.)
 
The person who gets hired will be decent looking and a good bullshitter, technical ability does not matter.
 
I agree with Unknown_K, for these shows, the knowledge that the individual has of certain items doesn't really matter. It seems to be about personality rather than the know how, and once a price is thrown out, Let the low-balling begin... Ever see pawn stars? if yes then you know what i'm talking about.
 
I figured a personality like Sellam Ismail would work for that (depending on how he talks, never heard his voice).
 
JDallas said:
How long would the show have to run, driving up interest and prices, before vintage computer counterfeiter would appear?
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Decades if not centuries. The cost to produce one replica of a Lisa say would far outweigh it's market value. The injection dies themselves would cost hundreds of thousands. Now if you simply wanted to mimic the original 5150's black p/s, then I guess it would be possible. But making an entire counterfeit computer, so not happening. Some Chinese manufacturer could be convinced to clone something, if sales would be on the order of thousands. But then the cat will be out of the bag, and you're not likely to pass one off as a fake.
 
tipc said:
The injection dies themselves would cost hundreds of thousands.
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You're not thinking small enough. 3-D printers can already do this for thousands, and 3-D scanners can do 99% of the work creating the model. If Lisas are going for 10K, then there is probably money to be made, if the buyers can't recognize vintage guts from replica guts.
 
and what do you think the cost for the set of parts making up the plastic shell would be? Assuming there was a 3d printer that large (yes I'm sure there are), those parts alone would cost hundreds, and you'd have to match the color exactly (it's not paint). And the texture/s. Then add to that the metal chassis. Then the cost to produce the circuit boards. Oh don't forget the ic's, unless you use a single fpga and fake the rest. Then the cost for the disk drives. Then the cost for the cathode ray tube. So not profitable as far as I can tell.
You can mimic things, like the example I mentioned above. Possibly mimic a Lisa 1. Oi whatever.
 
We're talking about a counterfeit, not a reproduction. A fully working reproduction Lisa would indeed be cost-prohibitive, but that's not the point of this exercise. All the fake Lisa would need to do is turn on and display something (could use a raspberry Pi hooked up to an HDMI->VGA converter and a VGA tube for that); the drives don't need to work, and the insides certainly don't need to be authentic. The color can be close but doesn't have to be exact -- it just has to resemble the pictures in vintage advertising. My point is that a counterfeiter would not be trying to sell to a real collector, he'd be selling to the clueless rich person to make a quick buck. Hell, the buyer probably won't even turn it on if the counterfeiter mocks up a box and packing material and passes it off as NIB!

Assuming he can sell the unit for $10K, I'm sure he could build it for $2K-$4K, making the effort worthwhile.

It probably doesn't need to be said, but I'll say it anyway: I am not in any way endorsing this practice.
 
Counterfeit vintage software is already an unfortunate reality. I'm in the fortunate? position not to have enough money to be bidding on the items that are often faked but I don't know if I would know any better myself. It's been commonly called out on the swcollect mailing list though which has been quite educational.
 
Trixter said:
All the fake Lisa would need to do is turn on and display something
Click to expand...

If you're going to do that call it a replica and sell it for a thousand or two.
There is actually a real market for that to museums. Sellam built a PDP-1
for a museum in Japan, for example.

I can see doing that in environments where you don't want thousands of people having physical
access to a rare artifact.

If you are talking about people with really deep pockets, they aren't going to be fooled by a counterfeit.
Speaking from experience, anyone spending that kind of money (10K+) is going to have someone inspect it for them.
 
Speaking of Sellam, he would be perfect for a show like this. Unfortunately I don't know how he's doing; I haven't seen any updates from/about him since the warehouse incident.
 
I guess I'll chime in here.

As part of the side work I do for the big auction houses is to verify that a system is original and not a reproduction. A reproduction could be a rebadged item or an item where components have been changed. In my "travels" have seen instances of Apple II plus systems "converted" to Apple II and cases of Altair systems not being in original state (though represented as), but replaced motherboards and 3rd party power supplies.

As for this show, I personally wouldn't want to be in a "pickers" type show. They don't want "pretty" people, they want conflict and sneakiness. They want two to three guys who argue on a regular basis, taking advantage of hoarders by noticing a shinny nugget in a pile of junk, and low balling for the pile, then cleaning and selling the nugget for a big profit.

I do have to admit, I am addicted to these kind of shows, because of the conflict and entertainment, though from the perspective of our hobby, this type of show isn't what I'd personally want to have made or want to be associated with. I think of the stars of the "picker" shows as slime balls, but entertaining slime balls.

Cheers,
Corey
 
I guess I'm in the minority but I don't particularly find the picker guys on American Pickers particularly slimy, at least in the episodes I've seen.

Let me ask this question: if any of us stumbled across someone selling a desirable computer artifact, something like say a Lisa at a flea market for $20, would we point that out to the seller and give him $600 for it? Remember too that the pickers are running this as a business, and they aren't going to want to pay top dollar for something that they are going to want to turn a profit on, especially if they are putting any amount of time into it.
 
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