90Q
Member
5150s are very common: Craigslist is full of them.
until you turn around, then suddenly! same fate
- VCF South West - June 14 - 16, Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at University of Texas at Dallas
- VCF West - Aug 2 - 3, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA
- VCF Midwest - Sept 7 - 8 2024, Schaumburg, IL
- VCF SoCal - Mid February 2025, Location TBD, Southern CA
- VCF East - April 2025, Infoage Museum, Wall NJ
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Half the damn collection for sale! Need money!
- Thread starter Raven
- Start date
until you turn around, then suddenly! same fate
I don't have a 5150, just a clone. Still what people on this website own or can get is probably not common to all collectors. From my point of view a few mailing lists and forums seem to have a large concentration of hoarders/dealers/long term collectors that know their stuff fairly well (industry insiders). How rare a 5150 is going to be (and what value it has) will be decided if/when the new collectors start buying stuff. Collecting is a pyramid scheme anyway, as long as new money keeps coming in in a large enough volume prices will rise. If you don't have a growing hobby then all the stuff will get recycled as prices drop to a point where selling them is not cost effective, or scrap value is worth much more then hobby money (melting 486 chips and PPros for gold is an example currently).
So many 5150s were produced over the years that scarcity is really not that much an issue. In addition, once collectible values go up, supply also goes up. There is a certain threshold at which people are willing to ship rather than trash when there is no local buyer.
Very few people are going to continue keeping a 30 year old machine that is worth little to nothing now (when will it be worth selling 30 fears after the owner is dead?). Recycleing and the whole green movement is helping people scrap machines they had in the attic now that you don't have to spend money to recycle a computer. Even collectors are liquidating and recycling their machines because of having to move or losing their houses and/or storage area. And this assumes most of the hoarded machines will not be functional any longer from corrosion and batter leakage or just parts that wore out (many people even here do not want to try and fix anything or pay to get things fixed).
How many machines do you have that people could not give away 10 years ago but now people spend good money for? At one point there was a huge glut of IIgs systems that you could not give away (most were recycled) and now people are paying decent money for a stock unit (let alone prices for the rarities has gone up quite a bit). Most of my Amiga collection I got about 8-10 years ago and now it would cost way too much to replace it. Newer systems are going from users directly to the recycling center, nobody is holding onto them like they used to do for the old $2000+ machines 20 years ago.
Some stuff is regional, SUN was never that popular around here for example, people must be tripping over then in CA.
How many machines do you have that people could not give away 10 years ago but now people spend good money for? At one point there was a huge glut of IIgs systems that you could not give away (most were recycled) and now people are paying decent money for a stock unit (let alone prices for the rarities has gone up quite a bit). Most of my Amiga collection I got about 8-10 years ago and now it would cost way too much to replace it. Newer systems are going from users directly to the recycling center, nobody is holding onto them like they used to do for the old $2000+ machines 20 years ago.
Some stuff is regional, SUN was never that popular around here for example, people must be tripping over then in CA.
Perhaps. There are still many people who keep stuff. There are 350.000.000 people in the US so that is a lot of storage.
Hardly any. There is no real collectors market for IBM PS/2 and IBM PS/ValuePoint machines. For some Apple and other systems there is more of a demand. Also: a lot recent collecting is based on nostalgia: guys in their 30s/40s/50s who long for their first encounters with computers. In a few decades most of those people will have moved on from it I believe and demand will drop drastically as will knowledge on how to operate the operating systems and hardware.
I was swimming in PS/2 Model 50Z machines in the late 90s. I even picked up a pair of Model 80s off of the side of the road back in 1999. They all got pitched, being 286/386, non-standard memory, bizarre HDs and the lack of MCA cards made them uninteresting. I would like to get my hands on that server that was PCI and MCA though. Even a 486 or Pentium would have been an improvement, I'd love to see Windows 95 on an MCA machine.
Europe seems to be filled with Amigas and Atari ST/TT/Falcons, despite them being produced by US based computer companies. Outside of their niche applications (Video Toaster, Scala MM local access graphics, and running the PREVUE channel), Amigas are pretty rare around here. I didn't even know the Atari ST existed until the late 90s. The opposite situation is the IIgs, it was in every US school, but pretty rare elsewhere besides France and Japan (both countries are well known for their Apple lovers). There were alot of Sun machines here in NJ, all the junk guys at the computer shows used to lug in palettes of Sparcstations trying to get rid of them. I even have a nice 20" Sun branded Sony Trinitron from one of those shows.
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redhawk579
Experienced Member
do you still have a nec v20 cpu