If you really wanted to make money though, stuff it all in Apple or MS shares, or find a patch of land with a barn on it for 20k and fill it with all the muscle cars, porsche etc you could get for $500 each because they were worthless around then.

Retrocomputing wise, your best investment might have been as many Apple 1s as you could scare up or a Lisa prototype.

Do you mean in 1990 or in the 1990s ?

In 1990, there were too few interesting option for my taste.

My journey in the land of PC hardware started in 1992. While I do enjoy the MT-32 and 1980s Sierra games, for example, I came of age later in the 1990s and the late 486 era up to the the Pentium 2 era are one of the most attractive periods to me.

That being said, a high end 486 (DX50) from 1991 along with both an SC-55 and an MT-32 and an EISA SVGA card might have worked for me

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-03, 06:35:

If you really wanted to make money though, stuff it all in Apple or MS shares, or find a patch of land with a barn on it for 20k and fill it with all the muscle cars, porsche etc you could get for $500 each because they were worthless around then.

Retrocomputing wise, your best investment might have been as many Apple 1s as you could scare up or a Lisa prototype.

thas is right.
If we could travel back to the last century, there would be ten thousand ways to make ourselves rich 😀

darry wrote on 2024-03-03, 07:21:

Do you mean in 1990 or in the 1990s ? […]
Show full quote

Do you mean in 1990 or in the 1990s ?

In 1990, there were too few interesting option for my taste.

My journey in the land of PC hardware started in 1992. While I do enjoy the MT-32 and 1980s Sierra games, for example, I came of age later in the 1990s and the late 486 era up to the the Pentium 2 era are one of the most attractive periods to me.

That being said, a high end 486 (DX50) from 1991 along with both an SC-55 and an MT-32 and an EISA SVGA card might have worked for me

I mean 1990s

1990? Sure - Fund a novalogic port of Night Striker using all the VGA tricks in the black book

On the average though, keeping it purely retro PC stuff focused, I don't know if you'd get much more in the 1990s for $100,000 as you can get right now. A lot of the things like OMG so expensive at $200 cards were releasing at $599 MRSP or so, and you'd need to buy near release to ensure availability, presuming you had limited amount of time to track stuff down. You could get your "first 486 machine" Compaq Deskpro for $10,000 that's worth $2000 now and so on. There's very little that's actually blown past release price, or even the price immediately before discontinuation.

I mostly live by the principle/saying that money can't buy happiness. It can help to solve some existential problems, though, I admit.
Personally, I've heard of people who had ~100k, but their lifes didn't change for the better, really.
If I had the money in the 90s, I guess I would have set it aside and continue as if it wasn't there.
Ok, maybe my library of SNES games would have been slightly more extensive. ;)

If talking purely gaming, then I'd buy a load of home retail versions of Metal Slug for the NeoGeo, plus more games like that which are 10-100x more expensive now than when they were released.

That doesn't really make a dent in something like classic cars, as mentioned above (anything air-cooled Porsche would, in hindsight, have been an utterly amazing investment). Beyond a few of the big names though, there are not many of the superstar stock options that (e.g none of your social media, nor even Google back then) to invest in back then - they simply didn't exist.

You'd have had most of the big names to invest in at the time, a lot would have seemed a safe bet, but a lot have now gone the way of the dinosaurs... Apple stands out as one which bucked the trend. Not that I admire them or like their products though. Microsoft is another.

I was a teenager in the 90s. If I had $100k back then I'd have bought myself a car. And probably a lot more video games.

Go back to 1983 and release 8088 domination

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-03-03, 20:03:

Go back to 1983 and release 8088 domination

Heh, it would either take 80s games to next level by inspiration or be a case of ... https://youtu.be/ZzAgacFBr48?si=LS1mA2xs9F5M4tE5

Wait up, just thought, can you tag another couple of zeros on the end ? I want to throw down with the Commodore UK Donald Pleasance buyout bid to save the Amiga.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-03, 06:35:

If you really wanted to make money though, stuff it all in Apple or MS shares, or find a patch of land with a barn on it for 20k and fill it with all the muscle cars, porsche etc you could get for $500 each because they were worthless around then.

Retrocomputing wise, your best investment might have been as many Apple 1s as you could scare up or a Lisa prototype.

for financial gain i think this is the approach, get shares and/or very rare items that will have value - though saying that, things were expensive back then and after inflation there aren't as many that really grew in value that much as we might think

for fun i like the cars idea 😀 in retro terms could get all kinds of 1990 (or 90's if thats the idea) stuff in pristine condition with duplicates for redundancy - i mea PCs and consoles but also top of the line VCR and TV, that kind of thing - could have a "1990 room" set up for eternity, well for some time

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-04, 14:46:

Wait up, just thought, can you tag another couple of zeros on the end ? I want to throw down with the Commodore UK Donald Pleasance buyout bid to save the Amiga.

Ideally the Eurozone Commodore should have been spun out and bought out by 1990 to save it from the most boneheaded BS.

Honestly Euro Commodore + Atari + Tandy/Memorex and Harris cpu fabs
Should have had governmental influence to be removed from the owners and merged into
C.A.T.

Together you would have all the necessary hardware and manufacturing capabilities to vertically produce PCs of any type

To make money, I'd just buy stock. It's the most practical way to achieve that instead of dealing with physical stuff.
But if I don't know the future of the stock market, it would be cool to get a programming job back then. I like programming for simple non-multitasking environments, it's less bureaucratic, it's just you and the machine, you don't have to interface with somebody else's APIs/etc.

But if I was to spend $100K on personal amusements, as in blow it on things I actually want, not to make money -
I'd have an extensive collection of console games. I stopped caring about consoles by the mid-90s, but I love them in the 2D era.
I'm sure I'd buy some computers - maybe a C64, maybe an A8, probably an Apple IIGS (I had an older Apple but really wanted a GS back then). Not sure about ST/Amiga (I never saw or used them).
Certainly I'd get an "IBM Compatible" 386DX or 486. NOT A 386SX!!! My family had one of those but I know better now.

New complete copies of each Ultima game, probably the Wizardry and Might&Magic games - at least the ones that were still coming out at that point. They date back to the 80s though.
Since I have money, I'm probably going to Babbage's every weekend to browse and buy new games. They'll love me, they'll be calling my name like "Norm" from Cheers.
Don't throw away any game boxes, even if they do take a lot of space.

I'd probably buy a couple Camaros or Firebirds, but they'd be used models from the 70s and 80s. Not the years most people want, but I like them. The 60s was before my time.
The 1970s models should be easy to modify for more power if desired.
Cars are generally lousy investments, I would not look at it that way. Whatever I buy would just be for me, not resale.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-03, 14:58:

On the average though, keeping it purely retro PC stuff focused, I don't know if you'd get much more in the 1990s for $100,000 as you can get right now. A lot of the things like OMG so expensive at $200 cards were releasing at $599 MRSP or so, and you'd need to buy near release to ensure availability, presuming you had limited amount of time to track stuff down. You could get your "first 486 machine" Compaq Deskpro for $10,000 that's worth $2000 now and so on. There's very little that's actually blown past release price, or even the price immediately before discontinuation.

Good point, but what if you just wait the time something that was previously released went "dead" cheap?
At some point all those expensive things went almost to "landfill" status, and then scoop 'em all.

Now, I don't know what though... 🤣

Yeah, you'd have to be buying 80s stuff in the 90s for that really, maybe grab some Altairs and other 70s stuff.

Would buy a fast retro 1990 model vroom-vroom car and date retro-girls who are in their 50's today. 😄

Come on, retro computers is just a silly hobby and looking for some good deal these days on eBay is part of the fun.

early 90's I'd of spent it on Lego (which as it turns out would probably been the best investment)
mid-late 90's constant upgrading from a 486 though to P2 with twice as many graphics cards. Things moved so quickly then.
for example our 486/66 we got in 1995 and was considered pretty good spec didn't get upgraded till '99 to a P2 400 with a TNT GPU. I missed out on Pentiums, glide, late dos and early Windows games.

By the end of the 90's I'd probably waste an awful lot on a car as well