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Fun and Profit With Obsolete Computers
An anonymous reader writes "C|Net has a story about the value of aging computer hardware, and the subculture of people who collect them. The story details some of the more enthusiastic collectors currently participating in the hobby, as well as their old-school beautiful hardware. '[Sellam Ismail] recently brought a quarter century-old Xerox Star computer back to life to be used as evidence in a patent lawsuit. The pride of his collection is an Apple Lisa, one of the first computers (introduced in 1983) with a now standard graphical interface. Such items sell for more than $10,000. In an old barn in Northern California that also houses pigs, Bruce Damer, 45, keeps a collection that includes a Cray-1 supercomputer, a Xerox Alto (an early microcomputer introduced in 1973) and early Apple prototypes. '
Well, you'd have to get the first MacBook (the black one, obviously, and no Core 2 cheating), or maybe one of those Acer Ferraris or something. It would have to be something that is unique, yet popular and the most expensive first version. A custom built PC or a Dell is simply out of the question.
Don't be crazy anymore!
Money making shouldn't be the goal because there's a good chance that it would fail at that. That is the nature of all forms of collecting.
It is often hard to predict what will succeed. If it's an interesting but rare device, then there are chances. If it's interesting but not so rare, then your only chances to make money are if there's demand because there's a common failure mode and hope that yours doesn't succumb to that failure. If it's just rare, then there's little chance unless you find a collector that wants to complete a series of that type of device for some odd reason.
As a collector of some of this old hardware (See my website, http://www.obsolyte.com/ ), I can tell you that for every "gem" you find, you also aquire about 2.5 tons of useless crap. It's very difficult to figure what machines will become the iconic collectables, and which ones will just be considered trash.
// at garage sales across the country, although, very likely missing key components.
The Apple Lisa is highly prized (although at one point, Apple was filling landfills with 'em and Sun Remarketing was selling what remained for $200 a pop), but the Mac 512k is pretty much ignored (although the original 128k Mac is valuable).
I have no idea what my old NeXT-Station is worth, but, it'll never be worth what the original Cube is. I have a pretty decent collection of SGI gear, but, does anyone care about SGI at this point? If you look on ebay, people can't even give that stuff away.
And while the Amiga may be the greatest computer ever made, you'd have trouble these days selling your A2000, no matter how tricked out it is (free Video toaster!). The Amiga collector market is saturated, anybody that wants an Amiga probably already has more than 2.
And you'll still find the venerable C=64 and Apple
Of course, should you have an original Altair in your basement, that's another story entirely.
TTYL
Brian Cirulnick
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
In another 30 years, many of these oldies will have died (if they haven't already) due to a variety of reasons. Mostly plain mechanical parts (cheap plastic, foil keyboard switches, rubber rolls crumbling and so on). Also think of programmed parts (EPROMs, programmable microcontrollers included for a specific task etc) that go into an erased state after a long, but finite time (usually several decades).
But if your machine still works after 30 years, plugging it into a monitor won't be the hard part. Last time I checked, even many of the latest LCD TV's have a variety of analog inputs. Why? Because analog inputs are often useful to hook up monitors to the widest possible variety of replay equipment. Even if many modern equipment is 'digitised', you're a fool to think that the option to display analog signals will disappear completely. Think of analog signals in general as a lower-level thing than most digital signals, meaning it's easier to do something with it, and easy to include in display equipment at near-zero added cost.
With audio, things are even easier/simpler.
For example this Sinclair ZX81 produces a TV UHF signal, but it's easy to pick up a plain composite video signal from its insides. Some soldering of wires might be required, but I expect you'll have a hard time finding a brandnew LCD TV that is not capable of producing an image with that.
One thing I personally like about these early Sinclair machines, is that they're built simple enough to recreate them with plain discrete logic, and perhaps a few analog parts. No complex video circuitry, no audio, a well-understood CPU and so on. Enough for instance to program a FPGA to behave like a ZX81 (try Google if you're interested). Also makes these machines relatively easy to repair. For ZX81: if you got the time, tools and knowledge, you can repair/keep these machines running as long as you want. I myself own 2 of these, last time I checked both were still working. 25 years old by now, and I'm pretty sure I can have these in a working state longer than a PC bought new today.
Comment analysis:
[x] Promotes Linux
[x] Bashes Microsoft and/or Vista
[ ] Bashes the MAFIAA
[ ] Mentions Apple
[ ] Defends individual rights and liberties
[x] Calls the American public dumb
[x] Pines for the good old days
Hmm... Good, but definitely could be better.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
is not finding the hardware - there's more of that around than you might expect. ... "real programmers" tended to ... tho' discovering where to download the emulator and software
There are even a lot of manuals floating around
keep a manual or two when the machine was replaced.
However, the software - which is perhaps the heart of the machine - and the cables
tended to get thrown away separately as soon as the CPU was closed down.
For example for the most popular mainframe in the UK in the 1970s - the ICL1900 series -
most of the small machine software (the operators Executive; the operating systems
George I & II; and the compilers that were used on the small machines like the 4K
versions of Algol and Fortran) seems to have been lost. It is lucky that one project
has managed to preserve the large system operating system (George 3) and some
related software
is tricky, to say the least.
I have also seen no evidence that anyone has preserved the GeCOS operating system
from the large Honeywell systems (6000, and its successor the Level 66). OK, it is
not so "special" as Multics, which ran on similar hardware, but still does contain
many interesting features - most notably in file handing. For that matter has the
B programming language (predecessor of C, designed for large-word oriented machines)
been saved anywhere?
Speaking of old demos and computers, check out Desert Dream on a Commodore 64. Amazing port.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
According to my textbook, a Cray 1 draws .15 MegaWatts (that may not even include the heat exchanger and cooling tower, or the IO processor and disk drive system). I'm not sure the power feed to a typical neighborhood block can support that, much less your power meter.