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. '

Comments

classiccmp

[Anonymous Coward]

No article such as this is complete without a link straight to the Classic Computer Mailing List, with its high volume of discussions, finds, swaps and technical solutions.

A couple of years ago I was involved in the dissemination of a collection in the south-east of England. From the PDP-11/43 that had people offering to drive over from northern Europe, to the blue Intel MDS to Spain, the old Dragon to America, the stalwart CJE Micros grabbing up the BBC's Torch coprocessor, to the steady stream of people each collecting a VAX, it was amazing to see the interest and enthusiasm.

Three nice things about old machines:
(1) Simple enough that a single human can understand how they work;
(2) Scaled such that this same human can fix problems in his garage;
(3) Sufficiently well built that (2) can sometimes be unnecessary even after 20 years.

Best for learning programming

[iamacat]

An original IBM PC would be perfect for teaching someone advanced programming.

• Interrupt handling - Check
  
• Instruction timing-based optimization - Check
  
• Drawing lines by directly altering video memory - Check
  
• Disk and memory data structures - Check
  
  On a modern computer, everything is wrapped into so many of abstraction that you can not discover how it works. It will take someone 3 years of experience to create a device driver or a graphics library that can be understood in 3 weeks on an old PC.

Re:Best for learning programming

[iamacat]

These gigahertz are actually a problem when learning certain topics in programming. How can one explain the value of Bresenham's line algorithm when a for loop using floating point appears just as fast? There is a huge learning value in running into limitations of the hardware and either optimizing your code or redefining its goals to solve a simpler problem. Something Vista engineers need to learn to avoid making a dual core machine crawl.

Re:Best for learning programming

[fabs64]

yes but these gigahertz cpu's also have gigabyte sized memory that you can chew through to see optimisation effects. The funny thing about complexity is it always scales

Profit, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can guarantee you that maintenance of such machines over 30 years has cost more than $10,000. If for no other reason than the real estate that they occupy. It is Silicon Valley after all. Rent out that room or shed you keep those heaps of junk in and you'll have $10,000 in 2 years rather than 30.

Think of it this way. If I told you that I wanted you to keep your current computer and all related peripherals for the next *30 years*, in working order, how much would I have to pay you to do that? I bet you'd ask for a lot more than $10k.

Same goes for any "collector's" item. People are amazed that a #1 issue of a golden age comic book will get $5,000 and up, and talk about it like it's an extraordinary profit for the seller. Ok, here's $5,000 -- now keep this piece of paper in pristine condition and obsess over it for the next 30 years. Sound like something you'd want to take up?

Yes, the prices are high but that doesn't imply profit by any human measure of economy.