Prices keep going up because resellers buy everything while enthusiasts hold onto their stuff.
Give it 20+ more years and you won't even be able to find a crappy little generic 286 board. Original IBM parts are scarce now and will be near unobtainable in 20+ years.
Resellers won't lower prices because whoever has the biggest inventory dictates the market. You want it, you pay up. And people will pay or choose a different hobby.
Same with classic cars. Most of them end up in junkyards or rust away in barns. The ones that are preserved worth more and more but owners rarely sell them. When they do who buys it? Car dealers.
And we haven't even talked about thrown out, destroyed or heavily modified parts. It happens all the time. I know a guy who collected old TVs and radios and when he suddenly died his relatives threw them out in the yard where rain destroyed everything. We are talking about hundreds of stuff from 1940s to 1980s. I myself am guilty of destroying a lot of computer parts when I was a stupid kid. It's an ongoing issue for collectors.
Acid damages, faulty capacitors, poor storage conditions and ignorance will take care of the rest. Yesterday's problem was the leaky barrell battery, tomorrow's problem will be corrosive LiPF6 from lithium button cells. Not many people care about removing button cells before storage and most of them buy cheap chinese batteries from Ebay sold by the dozen for 2 dollars.

It's probably the opposite of what you think and here is why. Since our generation is the only one who played with and used most of this stuff, the desire for most of these things are unique to us.

Like previous generations who collected items from their childhood or generation toys like popeye and other antiques of their days went up in price.

Heres the catch no one in gen Z and most of the millennials ever touched those items their parents collected, or do they care about them, just like we never played with the toys our fathers owned like popeye. Kids these days don't care about antiques, they like cheap chinneese shit from ikea and think that its good.

So just as the older generation dies off and thier collections flood the market places prices fall becasue not only does new generations have no attachments to those things but the supply becomes high and the demand becomes low.

The same thing will happen when older people start dying off in 20 years. Older Gen X people gen Z people wont want any of that stuff, gen z people are liettaraly more clueless than millennials do you think gen z kids will want somones Atari or nintendo collection...Highly unlikely.

Sometimes it's just beyond logic what these people are thinking - was looking for some cheap P3 skt370 procs today and my not too specific search threw up a listing for an Intel SDS2 dual socket 370 - $4,695.00 : 🤣 😲 😲

Now I know it's a excellent board & not too common, but please!

It's not that desirable/ really worth anything becasue it doesn't have AGP becasue no one is building servers like these, these days using old parts because its obsolete as a server.

they just hope that sometime somewhere some company that is using that specific board needs a replacement to keep a crucial system running and don't care about price ^^
the intent of a lot of those industrial PC/server part sellers is not to sell to collectors I guess.

highly unlikely. everyone is switching to low power stuff now for servers and my phone is probably faster than that thing.

Warlord wrote:

So just as the older generation dies off and thier collections flood the market places prices fall becasue not only does new generations have no attachments to those things but the supply becomes high and the demand becomes low.

So in the end it doesn't really matter as none of us is there to see or benefit from it. Until then, fork over the money. 🤑

Warlord wrote:

Since our generation is the only one who played with and used most of this stuff, the desire for most of these things are unique to us.

It rarely happens that way. People don't collect antique radios in their 20s because they listened to a similar radio 40 years ago. They collect them because they get an interest in that hobby. I wasn't even born when people used XTs yet it's my favourite collectible of all. It's an acquired taste.
People wouldn't collect anything if they were only interested in things they used/experienced before.
I also collect WW2 memorabilia and I never fought in WW2 nor any of my relatives.
Sentimental reasons are only a small part of all this.

for us old hardware isn't only a collectible like toys or stamps, they actually have utility, to run old games or other software, they serve a certain experience that can also be interesting for younger generations, sure toys can do that to, but not nearly to the degree that old computers do imho.

I've never been to an arcade when I was young, I started with a fully beefed out 386 PC when most people had 8bit computers if any, and yet I'm also interested in games and hardware I personally have no connection to or wasn't even alive when it came out.

computers have such an interesting and vast history, sure, the interest in younger generations might be a lot less, but it'll still be there, and I hope that many collections will be preserved for future generations even after we're all gone 😀

MMaximus wrote:

Badmojo, I've noticed this particular topic (i.e. discussion about prices) seems to be your one of your pet peeves 🤣

🤣 it is! I like bitching about things outside of my control as much as the next guy (Melbourne's weather anyone?) - my issue is that a minority of misguided participants in this particular conversation seem to take it personally. And sometimes they conclude that the blame for this perceived problem (i.e. "I can't afford X and I NEED it") rests with collectors with too much money, hoarders, greedy sellers, etc, and then the comments get personal - like they did earlier in this thread.

Net result is that people think twice about posting their awesome finds / purchases, and I want to see all that cool stuff damn it!

Miphee wrote:

It rarely happens that way. People don't collect antique radios in their 20s because they listened to a similar radio 40 years ago. They collect them because they get an interest in that hobby.

True. I turned 30 this year and one small hobby of mine is repairing old boomboxes. One of them is 50 years old. So, much older than me. I never had one of these in my childhood, but I like the aesthetics and the sound.

Also, there are people shooting with analogue cameras that were already obsolete when they were born. Polaroid even came back and started producing their films again because of this.

Retro is something new and interesting to explore for everyone.

I'm a little freaked out by software costs. A lot of stuff is now impossible to find. Stuff that I bought off a store shelf! If anything happens to yours, gone forever. 😢

schmatzler wrote:

Also, there are people shooting with analogue cameras that were already obsolete when they were born. Polaroid even came back and started producing their films again because of this.

Bit off-topic, but technically it wasn't Polaroid that came back. A group called the Impossible Project bought one of the last Polaroid factories, located in the Netherlands, then spent a lot of time recreating Polaroid film from scratch and refining it, as they didn't have the formulas, merely the machinery and facility.

Eventually one of the founders of the IP wanted to move on to new projects, and the son of a wealthy Polish investor got interested, made a big investment and became CEO. Then a few years later his father bought out the Polaroid Holdings company, which at that point only slapped its name on cheap tat, and thus IP became Polaroid Originals.

Let us not forget all of the e-celebs ramping up demand for legacy hardware and software. Woe is he who collects classic games, when the false prophet of hidden gems casts his vile spells on Youtube.

jaZz_KCS wrote:

SpectriaForce wrote:

astronomical sums

Care to elaborate how you ended up with those prices?
Am I missing something here?

Sure, I can. Pretty much everything I do is well thought out. Many factors, like posted earlier, determine the value of an item.

Take for example my IBM Industrial 486 pc of which some of you think that it's priced way too high. Think a little deeper. Suppose you manage a business that has a similar system in use (e.g. to control some expensive machine). This machine makes you earn hundreds if not thousands of your beloved currency each day. All of a sudden your legacy system breaks down and you don't have a spare unit. Now you lose hundreds if not thousands of business each day. You want a replacement a.s.a.p. (most likely within 24h), it has to be working and from someone who knows what he's doing. Where are you going to find that? The price that you pay me for this computer will prove to be a good investment within a couple of days time. The idea is that I'm not so much marketing this computer to a consumer, but instead to a business that actually sees an economical value in it.

I know that some of my items are not very interesting for businesses, but instead for consumers. Again many (other) reasons justify the prices (see my previous post).

Apart from that I want to add that I run a very small for profit business on my own. I have to pay my taxes and I have to pay my bills. I live in one of the most expensive countries in the world. I'm certainly not getting rich of my business. I do still have a passion for what I do, which I think is what really matters.

Warlord wrote:

The crazy thing about that is most of the shit on that page is junk, at least compared to my stuff

Ok 😵

Please explain me why most of it is junk and also where I can buy your superior stuff? 😉

SpectriaForce wrote:

Take for example my IBM Industrial 486 pc of which some of you think that it's priced way too high. Think a little deeper. Suppose you manage a business that has a similar system in use (e.g. to control some expensive machine). This machine makes you earn hundreds if not thousands of your beloved currency each day. All of a sudden your legacy system breaks down and you don't have a spare unit. Now you lose hundreds if not thousands of business each day. You want a replacement a.s.a.p. (most likely within 24h), it has to be working and from someone who knows what he's doing. Where are you going to find that? The price that you pay me for this computer will prove to be a good investment within a couple of days time. The idea is that I'm not so much marketing this computer to a consumer, but instead to a business that actually sees an economical value in it.

Has this situation ever actually materialised?

I'm not even being facetious, just curious if this kind of emergency situation is really all that common.

henryVK wrote:

Has this situation ever actually materialised?

The US Defense Department only recently got rid of their 8" floppy drives in their SACCS so anything is possible. 😁

henryVK wrote:

SpectriaForce wrote:

Take for example my IBM Industrial 486 pc of which some of you think that it's priced way too high. Think a little deeper. Suppose you manage a business that has a similar system in use (e.g. to control some expensive machine). This machine makes you earn hundreds if not thousands of your beloved currency each day. All of a sudden your legacy system breaks down and you don't have a spare unit. Now you lose hundreds if not thousands of business each day. You want a replacement a.s.a.p. (most likely within 24h), it has to be working and from someone who knows what he's doing. Where are you going to find that? The price that you pay me for this computer will prove to be a good investment within a couple of days time. The idea is that I'm not so much marketing this computer to a consumer, but instead to a business that actually sees an economical value in it.

Has this situation ever actually materialised?

I'm not even being facetious, just curious if this kind of emergency situation is really all that common.

It is a very small market.

Often the rationale is that buying a new machine or hiring someone to design and implement a virtualization solution costs thousands while I can supply them with something that only costs a fraction.

henryVK wrote:

Has this situation ever actually materialised?
I'm not even being facetious, just curious if this kind of emergency situation is really all that common.

Of course not. Not a single responsibly acting business would ever do that and buy another piece of overpriced obsolete legacy hardware just to run into the same kind of issues a few weeks/months later.