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What vintage PC hardware is considered highly collectible or ordinary and unwanted?

Generally anything people lusted after new will be wanted when people go retro.

A thousand times this. If you wonder why beige Pentium II 233MHz systems are going for $200+ on ebay, it's because people who are 35 now and having nostalgia for their youth were 15 back then and playing games on them.
 
A thousand times this. If you wonder why beige Pentium II 233MHz systems are going for $200+ on ebay, it's because people who are 35 now and having nostalgia for their youth were 15 back then and playing games on them.

It's got to be more than that for them to command such high prices though.
Many people grew up playing games on a NES, but they don't go for that much money. I picked one up last year for $30 including shipping.

I think the other factor is availability. PC's were pretty much a commodity by that time, and could also be upgraded.
The older machines were superseded by newer hardware that could still play all the games you played on your old hardware - essentially the same machine but faster and better.
Why would you keep your old one?

Eventually those machines would be handed down to friends and family until a new version of Windows came out that wouldn't run well enough on the old machine, and then it would end up in landfill.

An NES will still play all the games released for it, but PC's underwent forced obsolescence.

I think they go for high prices because of two factors; nostalgia and rarity. They were extremely common when new, but not many have survived.

Looking at the PC's available on ebay, it looks like a lot of them were office machines. That makes sense, because businesses will often upgrade only when they absolutely have to, and it's also difficult and expensive to dispose of a large amount of computer equipment.

My small collection of old PC's came from a skid in the warehouse at my job, where they had been stored for a couple of decades.
I was given the task of arranging for it to be recycled, which I will have to do because I've taken as many home as I have room for (or that my wife has decided we have room for :D ).

I bet a lot of those ebay machines either come from people like me who's boss lets them take them home, or from recycling centers that get lots of machines from businesses.
I bet hardly any of them have actually been stored in peoples homes this whole time - those probably got discarded decades ago, just like my first Pentium 1 machine :cry:
 
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Nobody throws away a console that works (and many millions were made), they just get passed around. PC's of the P2 generation get recycled. The NES will probably have a longer life then newer consoles that bake themselves to death.
 
I didn't say they were actually worth it :D

I've been looking at HP Vectras, because some of them have cases that would be suitable for my project.
Some of the buy it now prices are astronomical!

And if you think these old machines aren't actually selling for these prices, I searched for a machine I own just to see what it's worth - a Gateway GP6-400.
I searched for items that had actually sold, and the same machine went for $213.75 plus $93 shipping!

I totally agree that they aren't worth what some people are asking for them, but someone's buying them...

I have an off topic question, I wish I knew how to find lists of sold auctions on Ebay. All I can see is Items currently for sale.
 
Doesn't ebay have a way to search all their closed auctions going back years to paying customers?
 
I didn't say they were actually worth it :D

I've been looking at HP Vectras, because some of them have cases that would be suitable for my project.
Some of the buy it now prices are astronomical!

And if you think these old machines aren't actually selling for these prices, I searched for a machine I own just to see what it's worth - a Gateway GP6-400.
I searched for items that had actually sold, and the same machine went for $213.75 plus $93 shipping!

I totally agree that they aren't worth what some people are asking for them, but someone's buying them...

Many of these are probably going to companies that have "mission critical" machines that are 10-20 years old. They die, the business doesn't want to shell out for a completely new piece of kit, so they buy another machine of the same vintage, and patch the problem.

My previous job (on Cable Ships) we had more P1 and P2 hardware (and even a few 3/486's) running things than you'd expect. These are in pieces of equipment that costed hundreds of thousands of dollars, and upgrading would cost hundreds of thousands more.. So, we'd regularly find vintage hardware on eBay or other sources to patch our failed stuff to keep it going another few years. I have no doubt this will continue until there is no more compatible hardware on eBay. Before I left, the last upgrades were installing DOM's on some PII Rackmount PC's that ran the Kongsberg Echosounder. Those things were already 15 years old, and had the original 2gb hdd's still plugging away happily until one of the 6 units failed.. We upgraded the whole fleet.
 
Most industrial systems I have seen based on PCs of the Pentium and later generations were industrial SBC boards and cases. Some places used cheap PC's for HMI interfaces but you could use pretty much anything for that and replace it easily with newer hardware. Hospitals might have used commodity PCs to interface with expensive lab equipment and replacements might need to be "certified". PLC's got cheap in the late 90's and everybody was using them.

The pre Pentium era seems to be a free for all of kludged computers and specialized cards that would be a nightmare to keep running.
 
Kongsberg (a maritime electronics company) has used off-the-shelf PC's in their equipment for decades. Rackmount cases with standard consumer grade motherboards. They've been known to use HP machines for their "Clean" area setups, such as Vectras, or more modern SFF PC's in their newer setups. Thousands of ships run Kongsberg gear, and if most of them are like the company I used to work for, will most likely do what we did to save cash.

That's just one example. Several other types of equipment ran standard consumer grade PC's as well, with proprietary network data setups that only run on Win2000, and don't work on XP+. Those software suites cost in the $40-50k range, and they aren't paying for the new versions ;)
 
Most industrial systems I have seen based on PCs of the Pentium and later generations were industrial SBC boards and cases.
The vast majority that I'm familiar with are either all-in-one card PCs, or black boxes with who knows what inside, but too small to have ATX motherboards or any kind of expansion slots.
 
I have bought and sold 100s of vintage PC items over the years. Everything is supply and demand. Plus quality. Generic TW ISA Windows 9X era sound cards are worthless. Roland / GUS are valuable.

IBM always sells pretty well. Generic PCs not so much.

There is a lot of really cheap supply when you spend time browsing and using alternative keywords on eBay / Craigslist (SearchTempest) / FreeCycle / Facebook and hobbyist websites.

I have virtually nothing left. Got tired and frustrated with it. :)
 
Many of these are probably going to companies that have "mission critical" machines that are 10-20 years old. They die, the business doesn't want to shell out for a completely new piece of kit, so they buy another machine of the same vintage, and patch the problem.

My previous job (on Cable Ships) we had more P1 and P2 hardware (and even a few 3/486's) running things than you'd expect. These are in pieces of equipment that costed hundreds of thousands of dollars, and upgrading would cost hundreds of thousands more.. So, we'd regularly find vintage hardware on eBay or other sources to patch our failed stuff to keep it going another few years. I have no doubt this will continue until there is no more compatible hardware on eBay. Before I left, the last upgrades were installing DOM's on some PII Rackmount PC's that ran the Kongsberg Echosounder. Those things were already 15 years old, and had the original 2gb hdd's still plugging away happily until one of the 6 units failed.. We upgraded the whole fleet.

This is true - I am a (very) amateur machinist, and I know a lot of the cnc guys have machines that are controlled by pc's that still use floppy disks.
There was a general wave of relief that spread throughout the community when the first usb floppy emulators came out.
Floppies are fun to mess around with, but I imagine they would be much less fun if you had to rely on them for a non vintage computer related task.
 
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