I'd say yes most of it will, minus budget boards and the like, high end GPU's, good quality Ram, Mobos and i5/i7 cpu's as well as AMD Phenom II/Ryzen, I cant see the FX becoming collectible.

I'm kind of skeptical anything beyond PIII will ever be considered desireable. It's just too generic and boring. Do people even use desktops anymore? It seems like young people only use tablets and phones.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I'm kind of skeptical anything beyond PIII will ever be considered desireable. It's just too generic and boring. Do people even use desktops anymore? It seems like young people only use tablets and phones.

I felt the same way about my 286 motherboard. "Nobody's ever going to want this, 386 does literally everything this does but just a little better."

candle_86 wrote:

I'd say yes most of it will, minus budget boards and the like, high end GPU's, good quality Ram, Mobos and i5/i7 cpu's as well as AMD Phenom II/Ryzen, I cant see the FX becoming collectible.

Don't knock the budget boards - just look how popular the PC-Chips M919 is these days... 😜

Anything becomes collectible if demand outstrips supply. I doubt whether any of us old fogeys will get nostalgic about today's hardware, but our children might. That said, their emotional investment is more in their smartphones than in any PC - so I'd put more money on old phones getting seriously collectible - as you already see happening with the Nokia N900 and Mororola Droid/Milestone. But somebody, somewhere will have a warm spot in his heart for his 1060 and i5 and will get nostalgic about that long after most have been thrown away...

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I'm kind of skeptical anything beyond PIII will ever be considered desireable. It's just too generic and boring. Do people even use desktops anymore? It seems like young people only use tablets and phones.

Yeah, I remember the late 90s, 486 machines getting dumped because nobody believed anyone would ever want to use them again in the future.

I call bullshit on the idea modern stuff will never become retro.

Everything will become retro at some point. The better question is what will be desirable at that point. That boils down to a few basic premises. Items will be desirable if they are the first of something or the last of something, they were very expensive and/or rare, products that were incredibly popular, products that were a total failure, products from brands that no longer exist, Stuff that got hyped up to the high heavens regardless if they were actually good and of course everything that was weird and bizarre.

Some pieces of hardware I can see becoming sought after are;

GTX 780TI and GTX 960: the former being the most powerful GPU with windows XP support, the latter being the last nvidia GPU with Windows XP support. (most AMD cards lack the mindshare to become particularly popular as collectors items, they likely will be, or rather stay the budget options.)
Radeon Fury: First GPU with HBM
Radeon Vega Frontier Edition: Expensive beyond reason, therefore rare and ultimately because of that a failure
AMD FX 9000 series: They were a dumb idea to begin with, expensive, quite uncommon, way to slow for both price and power consumption, not just a failure but an outright disaster (good luck finding a motherboard that can survive them.)
The upcoming (rumored) i7 8086k: commemorative CPU for the 40 Year anniversary of the x86 architecture, this WILL be a collectors item some years down the line.
working(!) 8000 series geforce cards: Bumpgate, most will die.
I can to a degree see old (SATA) SSDs in working condition becoming something of a niche collectors area, depending on how storage develops in the future, but I'm dubious on that one.

There is certainly more but that is what I can think of at the moment.

Everything that seems to be "the last of its kind" deserves to be kept.

e.g.: new expansion card slot comes out –> then the last generation of mainboards that still have fully functional old slots is going to be more "interesting" or desirable in the future.
We've seen this happen several times.

Similarly the last graphics cards with drivers for some "important" Windows version (like XP, 7, 10).

I think retro hardware such as 2/3/486 and even Pentium I/II/III generation computers have gained importance due to their ability to run software that newer computers cannot run well, if at all.
Before Windows XP, a lot of software was very hardware sensitive, and speed sensitive. Sometimes just a few MHz too many and the game would crash or be unplayable.
Sometimes games needed very specific hardware to run, this is especially true for DOS-era games.

Today, with Windows 7 and above, I'd say most software is completely hardware agnostic as long as meeting minimum requirements. So other than for sentimental value, I just don't see why one would actively seek an older P4 or Core-generation machine to play games on Windows 7+. And if its to install XP, what games are these that can take advantage of such hardware also won't also run on a modern Windows 7+ machine?

So the question is, are we talking about useful retro? or sentimental retro?

Obviously this is my take, but please enlighten me.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I'm kind of skeptical anything beyond PIII will ever be considered desireable. It's just too generic and boring.

But that's what we were saying about Pentium II's, III's, and 4's back in 2001 when I started?

That's what everyone was saying about ALL of the PC's we talk about here on VOGONS back then.....

"HAHAH, 486? What are you doing with that old Boat Anchor"

"Tandy 1000 - whatta' dinosaur!"

"286? I remember when Bill Gates called them "Braindead"

"It's just another stupid beige box with grey panels.......who wants an old 386? Dude, you need a Girlfriend!"

I think PC Nostalgia might not be as strong with future generations, but it will be there. We all go back and try to get the things we wanted when we were kids. Heck, half the reason I'm here is because back when my sister had a 386 we used to get in arguments over who broke it (someone turned it off without exiting a program and it corrupted AUTOEXEC.BAT and cost $60 to fix) - so I swore up and down to that sister I'd have the computer SHE'D want someday - a 486 with a huge hard disk, a soundblaster, and SVGA, and you would not need to remove a game to install another one because no rinky dink 80MB HDD. It'd like to think I have achived that one 1000x over now, 🤣.

I think the collectables of the future will be a lot in tablets, the Microsoft Surface series, iPads, iPhones, and such. Already people are hoarding Zunes and it pisses me off because I want to stockpile a few to actually USE (I prefer a discreet mp3 player to using my phone). The Samsung Galaxy S3 would be another one (kind of the same way we love PS/2s). The Samsung Tablets from 2013 will be like what the PC Chips M919 is now....speaking of....

dionb wrote:

Don't knock the budget boards - just look how popular the PC-Chips M919 is these days... 😜

Jeebuz, I remember cringing when I first found the Redhill Guide to PC hardware back in the 2000's, now I bought one for $20 just a couple weeks ago myself. I'm planning to find a cache module that's bad and etch my own PCBs for them! Still need to get that thing to POST first though....and by golly I will get it to POST, even if it takes breaking out a logic analyser and firing up the soldering iron. PC's are really boosting my electronics abilities lately.

Koltoroc wrote:

Yeah, I remember the late 90s, 486 machines getting dumped because nobody believed anyone would ever want to use them again in the future.

Exactly. Hell, if I still had all the old 486's I've owned, which totals up to somewhere about 30 or 40 from 2001 to present - I'd probably be able to get a good chunk of our home down payment selling them off.

tpowell.ca wrote:

I think retro hardware such as 2/3/486 and even Pentium I/II/III generation computers have gained importance due to their abilit […]
Show full quote

I think retro hardware such as 2/3/486 and even Pentium I/II/III generation computers have gained importance due to their ability to run software that newer computers cannot run well, if at all.
Before Windows XP, a lot of software was very hardware sensitive, and speed sensitive. Sometimes just a few MHz too many and the game would crash or be unplayable.
Sometimes games needed very specific hardware to run, this is especially true for DOS-era games.

Today, with Windows 7 and above, I'd say most software is completely hardware agnostic as long as meeting minimum requirements. So other than for sentimental value, I just don't see why one would actively seek an older P4 or Core-generation machine to play games on Windows 7+. And if its to install XP, what games are these that can take advantage of such hardware also won't also run on a modern Windows 7+ machine?

So the question is, are we talking about useful retro? or sentimental retro?

Obviously this is my take, but please enlighten me.

That's a big part of it though I find just about anything Pentium Era or newer I can get to run on Windows 10 properly for some reason. And it still feels retro to me because my modern box is in an ancient mATX InWin D500 case, and it's beige, and has a clicky keyboard (and my 486 is currently sharing it's LCD on the VGA port). But a lot of people want to relive or have that experience they wanted in the 90's/80's now. I tend to consider the "vintage" breaking point to be 20 years.

I remember getting into this hobby in 2001 - all those quotes I posted above - those all happened to me. Imagine my shock in 2008 when I'm on an I.T. project and all of a sudden I'm the "cool guy" because I own a still functioning and still in use Tandy 1000! All of a sudden these "dinosaurs" were "cool" and "vintage" instead of "MAAAAN! Just throw that thing out and buy a Core 2 Duo! What do you do with that? It can't even run PONG!". Back then I had a boss who made fun of me because I had a 286 in my fleet ("My Cell Phone has more power than your 286!") - hah - now suddenly people are like "You'd better hold onto that, it'll be valueable someday" - yeah, that someday is now. I look all the time on E-bay and the stuff I used to go to thrift shops and be paid $5 to take away now costs $200,300, 400? I cashed my chips a little early honestly, 🤣.

And it's already happening. Pentium 4's I'm starting to see fade from the thrift shops and now I'm seeing the places that carry computers are starting to have stuff like what I'm STILL using as my main (I still use a Core 2 Duo for daily work - I don't need anything faster)..which raises a bit of a curve ball for the Core 2 Duo generation and newer....

I work at a development house, a huge one, one of the biggest in the world. We have some of the latest hardware here - i7's with 32-64GB of RAM, 1TB SSD drives, and NVIDIA 1080s - but we also have thirteen year old PC's still in use - if I glance to my left, there's an HP DC7900 from 2009! I go home and my laptop is a Toshiba A135 and I have a Core 2 Duo on my desktop - they all run Windows 10 64-bit no problem and unless you are doing some huge compiling or something fancy, most tasks are still doable at more than comfortable speed. But when I started in this hobby in 2001 - my 486 could not run Windows XP (at least not without trickery, and I'm not sure why one would want to), and what was holding it back the most was a lot of myths and lies about what a 486 could and could not handle. People telling me that 486's can't use modems, can't get on the internet, can't play entertaining games (C'mon man! You can't run Ghost Recon and Halo on a 486!....yeah, like I'd want to), and I basically made an entire website and a tiny web presence for awhile around proving all of those wrong at the time. Nowadays what's the worst thing? TPM 1.2? Can't find drivers for Windows 10 (turn off driver signing and use Windows 7 drivers and turn off automatic updates and use common sense - or just use Linux)? 10 years is not the huge gap in technology it used to be.

And the hilarious part is a 486 is still not that shabby for a lot of things. Nathan Lineback's hacked Seamonkey and Firefox allow me to access all the HTTPS sites through Windows 95 in 2018. I burn DVD-Rs and CD-R's if I just ignore system requirements. VirtualCD allows me to run all my CD-ROMs off the hard disk, like Diablo or Hoyale Card games. IRC, FTP, Website Authoring, graphics.....honestly, if I did not have a love for watching youtube I could probably still use a 486 as my daily driver. I even do digital audio on it (Cakewalk 5). But there's just something special and cool about doing all that and all the old games that run on that era of hardware to me. If you ask me it's obsolete by native software and hardware, but through hardware and software tricks, it's not. Which amuses me to no end. You'd never see me making purchases on one, but the benign stuff where the only risk is some weirdo "Stealing my Monkey Islands" is more than game 🤣 - pun intended.

That's why I think today's hardware will have it's future retro-devotees, but it might not be as big because tablets/smartphones being the dominant devices. I do know people with no computer that just use smartphones and tablets for everything. But then maybe not, those people dont' tend to get attached to their devices so much, and if they do, they tend to keep the old ones anyway.....they're already in the game, it's just the money is not there yet.

And Money is a big part of it. Always was. When people were making fun of me and my 486's back in 2001, the arguement was the worthiness (in $$$) of my bro-in-law's comic book collection or the worhtiness (in $$$) of my sister's beanie babies. In a way, all the disposal of these "old pieces of junk" lead to their worthiness now because you don't just wander into the local Salvation Army and see stacks of AT clones anymore. Back when there was - they were paying me to take them away as they had sat there for months.

Another fine example of this is RE-PC in Seattle. I'm pretty sure around 2001-2005ish, RE-PC probably had a good pile of used 286/386/486 hardware they sold for pennies on the dollar at the time. Because it was old junk, and they wanted to get rid of it, then sometime around 2005, what use would that have been to someone? So all the old "beige" stuff got scrapped I'm pretty sure - then I come into Tukwila this year and what do I find? No less than four boxes of 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Super Socket 7, Slot 1, and AMD Athlon boards from the eras we are discussing here, some over $100 based on their e-bay prices, some as cheap as $15-20 (I paid $20 for my PC Chips M919), with $25-45 being the average. And bins organized full of disk standard adapters, old ISA cards, and so fourth.

The life of a PC Generation is typically this - > Cutting Edge->Mainstream->Old But useful->Total Junk/E-Waste->Hey I remember that!->Vintage

I really don't see any value in collecting old cellphones, although I (of course) have kept like all 20 of mine.

Most of them are completely unusable at this point. Batteries have expired and are non-replaceable, they barely work on carriers, the application infrastructure is going and/or completely gone. I suppose old android APKs will be available on pirate sites for a while, but so many of those still depend on web services and downloading game data from remote servers that are long gone.

Although I suppose there's no requirement that something be "usable" in order to be collectible...

A few points of stuff that has been mentioned.

Geforce 8800 series bumpgate. How do I have 5x 8800 Ultra cards that all work fine? 1 I bought by itself a while ago and retro-fitted an Arctic Accellero II on it along with a RAM/VRM cooling kit from a different company.

The other 4 I have I bought in an AS-IS lot for about $10 a piece. All 4 work just fine.

And as for the other Geforce cards in the same family I have had in the past, not a single one has died that I know of... I used to pass my old stuff down to family/friends when I was done with it. Pretty easy to keep track of things working/dying that way, especially when they come back to you for something else if something dies on them.

Then as for stuff becoming retro... Pretty much everything will be considered "retro" at some point.

Imagine my surprise when I joined vogons and found that there were people that collect Packard Bell equipment.... I couldn't stand Packard Bell stuff back in the day. Their support was horrendous compared to other companies of the same era.

And I've started collecting some industrial rack mount hardware. 386, Pentium II, Pentium IV, and I may get some more different industrial stuff if I find it at acceptable prices to me.
I even picked up a couple LGA 1156 boards because they were super cheap. The only problem is finding PICMG v1.3 backplanes for a good price. Who else collects that stuff?
If the price is right, you can make great retro machines as the number of slots available is generally amazing and that equipment is usually made to higher standards than consumer oriented hardware.

Another thing I thought I would never collect was laptops. And yet I now have a full gamut of old Sony Vaio laptops because they have full DOS sound support due to them having built in Yamaha XG chipsets that are wired with the PC/PCI link for the best possible DOS support you can get with those chipsets.
I've also got a few other old laptops as well.

I've been building and repairing computers for over 25 years now. There was a time when I would just get rid of my old hardware even though there were a few pieces I held onto all this time. Oldest I still have is an Opti 930 based ISA sound card with onboard wavetable that I bought used from an electronics store back when I was still running either an 80386 or 80486-DX266. Best soundcard I ever had as far as compatibility with all DOS games. Now I have collected as many different variations of the Opti cards with onboard wavetable that I could find.

I do have a lot of higher end soundcards in my collection now, but those old Opti cards just make me smile when I think about how long I used that one card as my main sound card.

tpowell.ca wrote:

Today, with Windows 7 and above, I'd say most software is completely hardware agnostic as long as meeting minimum requirements.

A few years ago, I would have agreed without hesitation. Now, not anymore.
Windows Seven is beeing actively fought by both Intel and Microsoft, its creator.

Begining with trivial stuff like USB 3.0 controllers without a legacy block (before, this was common practice),
that Windows 7 cannot see or boot from without special drivers (if available)..

Over the artificial exclution of Windows 7 on modern processors, up to the removal of CSM in 2020 (will modern UEFI
past 2020 still allow Win 7 to boot in native UEFI mode ? When Win Seven is dead in 2020, is its license/cerificate still valid ?)

Part of what makes me wonder about the collectability of current hardware is the lack of variety, really. I haven't bought a non-GPU expansion card for a computer in AGES, apart from a USB card or two. My computers themselves are motherboard, CPU/fan, and video card.

I bet the accessories will be some of the collectible items in the future. Cases, LED lighting kits, watercooling kits, mechanical gamer keyboards, gaming mice, etc. etc.

I'd say R9 290s. Great performers that got burned out by crypto miners. Can run a proprietary Mantle API. Plus the stock cooler looks friggin amazing.

Single slot video cards will be collectible. Things like ELSAs 750 Ti and 1050 and new are quite rare already and are becoming more sought after because of their uniqueness and high performance in small PCs.

Wii U will probably become retro because it had such poor sales and such a short lifespan, but still had Nintendo character to it. It will become a modern day SEGA Saturn type "forgotten" console.

ATX cases with simple clean power buttons and drive bays are also becoming rarer and rarer. Lian Li cases in particular will be worth a lot of money in future. Finding a well built ATX case with a more traditional configuration is very difficult already.

I like older Lian Li cases.. but the problem with them is the cable management is horrible due to no space behind the motherboard tray and that side of the case.

My main rig is inside a 2005 Lian Li case that I had to add extra fans to because the airflow through the case was horrid for newer, more power hungry systems.

Another build is in a Lian Li PC-100 case. The one that the rear panel stuff faces the front of the case for easier access. It has absolutely horrid cable management as well.

I've also got another full tower Lian-Li case waiting for me at a relative's house that I had them pick up from a craigslist ad. Just have to wait to visit them to get it.

Munx wrote:

I'd say R9 290s. Great performers that got burned out by crypto miners. Can run a proprietary Mantle API. Plus the stock cooler looks friggin amazing.

You mean this one? 🤣
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5YJsMaT_AE

Jo22 wrote:

Begining with trivial stuff like USB 3.0 controllers without a legacy block (before, this was common practice), that Windows 7 c […]
Show full quote

Begining with trivial stuff like USB 3.0 controllers without a legacy block (before, this was common practice),
that Windows 7 cannot see or boot from without special drivers (if available)..

Over the artificial exclution of Windows 7 on modern processors, up to the removal of CSM in 2020 (will modern UEFI
past 2020 still allow Win 7 to boot in native UEFI mode ? When Win Seven is dead in 2020, is its license/cerificate still valid ?)

You're absolutely right, but this would assume that people would want or need to run Windows 7 (or Vista...😵) rather than Windows 8.x or 10. I can't think of any WinXP era game that won't run happily if not better on Windows 10.

Srandista wrote:

Munx wrote:

I'd say R9 290s. Great performers that got burned out by crypto miners. Can run a proprietary Mantle API. Plus the stock cooler looks friggin amazing.

Radeon R9 390/390X ("cheap" 8GB VRAM GPU + Mantle).
All Nvidia Titans (because coolness, speed per generation, and VRAM capacity).
6950X because (probably) last non-Mesh type CPU.
LGA 1366, because cheap BCLK unlocked Hex Cores (already here ?), and OS compatibility + Spectre 2-nd type "fix".

I booted and used Windows 7 SP1 from NVMe as GPT drive (at which point CSM isn't needed, since you need to use EFI to boot from it).
Main problem are drivers for stuff, if we get drivers (moded or not), we should be fine.

tpowell.ca wrote:

I think retro hardware such as 2/3/486 and even Pentium I/II/III generation computers have gained importance due to their abilit […]
Show full quote

I think retro hardware such as 2/3/486 and even Pentium I/II/III generation computers have gained importance due to their ability to run software that newer computers cannot run well, if at all.
Before Windows XP, a lot of software was very hardware sensitive, and speed sensitive. Sometimes just a few MHz too many and the game would crash or be unplayable.
Sometimes games needed very specific hardware to run, this is especially true for DOS-era games.

Today, with Windows 7 and above, I'd say most software is completely hardware agnostic as long as meeting minimum requirements. So other than for sentimental value, I just don't see why one would actively seek an older P4 or Core-generation machine to play games on Windows 7+. And if its to install XP, what games are these that can take advantage of such hardware also won't also run on a modern Windows 7+ machine?

So the question is, are we talking about useful retro? or sentimental retro?

Obviously this is my take, but please enlighten me.

anything with safedisk or similar