Hm. I remain deeply sceptical! :)

Stick in there with the old stuff, I just got an mc-400 for £5 at my local car boot, a couple of years ago I picked up a Nascom 3 for £2 with twin disk drives (and a nice Lucas badge on the 'blow molded' case) I have an attic full of Apple 2's and 68k Macs (including an apple 2 clone that just comes up with "computer" on the boot up screen rather than Apple).
I hope that it will all be worth something one day.

Edited by author 06-29-2003 10:28 PM
Damn, damn and thrice damn. In fact, damn again. You mean to tell me that the ultra-scarce IBM-compatible Sinclair that's been hogging space in my study (8-bit, looks like an Amiga/Atari, classic "Sinclair black" case, and failed to make it into the shops (or even full production!)before Sinclair went broke ISN'T going to be worth a fortune some day? I had hopes that if ANY system was going to be worth something someday, then THAT one would be. But then again... my collection of Corgi and Dinky toys - long since binned or given away as "worthless"... the cardboard boxes filled with Hornby wind-up trains (and several hundred feet of track) got binned too as "a worthless waste of space". Yet replacing them with 40 - 50 year old pieces in the same condition would cost me a literal fortune. I think one has to bear in mind that price is tied to scarcity value - and as the computers you describe were mass-produced items, and are only a few years out of production - there's a considerable surplus of supply over demand. Give it a few years for the mahority of that surplus to make its way from attics to car boot sales to landfill, give nostalgia a chance, and values WILL start to rise.

THE great puzzle to outsiders lies in the cost of 168-pin SDIMMs. PC133 RAM is superior to PC66 or PC100, no? And it's supposedly "backwardly compatible". So the "better" product SHOULD command a price premium: a 128meg stick of PC133 OUGHT to cost more than a 128meg stick of PC100. Yet check some price lists - you'll find it costs 25% more. Essentially because (a) It's not quite as "compatible" as it should be (b) there's still demand for the old stuff, (c) the old stuff is no longer made and is in short supply.

"Slightly defunct" CPU prices equally seem to defy logic - price is determined by "the last official RRP". Prices are in continual freefall - UNTIL they drop off the price list altogether. Then they "stick" at the last given price - which may be HIGHER than the current mid-range CPU's price, if there's been an across-the-board price cut. When, subsequently, the demand collapses, so too does the price. (You can scarecely GIVE a P100 away, but the price of an AMD K6-2/500, which can still breathe a little more life into an elderly socket-7 system, commands a respectable price.)

Sorry Guy - I think you've got this one wrong. That VIC-20 may be worth a fiver today, and a quid next year... but give it another ten or twenty years, and it WILL be worth something again. I remember in the sixties, people BURNED Victorian furniture as both ugly AND worthless. I bet they now wish they hadn't. Now it's not only "collectable" - it's VALUABLE.

Time to clear out the attic. If a really rare computer like a Psion MC400 - the first tablet pc I ever used, and only a couple of thousand were ever sold - goes for three pounds (five dollars at best!) then there really is no point in keeping all those old bits of junk, is there?

Oh, how awful! A non-celebrity opening a computer museum, in obvious pain...