TrashPanda wrote on 2022-01-19, 13:09:

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2022-01-19, 13:08:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-01-19, 13:04:

Just gonna grab a AGP one .. I just saw the shipping on teh PCI one ...its nearly 100 USD to ship it and 170 to buy it ...WTF on that shipping.

100 USD for shipping? 😮 Where do you live? On the Moon?

Australia so pretty dang close to the moon.

Ahh, that fairyland where people walk upside down? 🙂

By the way, the most expensive purchase I've ever made till this day was from an Australian seller. Only shipping costed me around 250 USD 😁

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-01-19, 12:45:

Sitting here wondering if 170 USD is too much for a rare PCI version of a Voodoo Banshee, only ever seen one PCI PC version of it before this one.

Man, those Banshees got expensive. I've got a Creative 3D Blaster Banshee PCI, one of the few cards I bought new in box and never sold. I needed a PCI card to recover AGP cards from a failed flash. That's the only reason this card is still with me. When graphics cards switched from AGP to PCIe, it went into a drawer. If I wouldn't have kept this one, I'd be very tempted to spend this much money to have it back.

Oh boy, I have those two PCI Banshees for Macs made by Village Tronic. Wonder what they're worth now?😅
I've also got a Mac PCI V3 3500 with 5ns RAM by Village Tronic. They don't ever show up on ebay, do they?

Edit: The cards are VillageTronic MacPicasso 750, MacPicasso 850 and MacPicasso 960. Anyone got any idea about their collector's value?

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-01-19, 13:09:

Australia so pretty dang close to the moon. […]
Show full quote

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2022-01-19, 13:08:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-01-19, 13:04:

Just gonna grab a AGP one .. I just saw the shipping on teh PCI one ...its nearly 100 USD to ship it and 170 to buy it ...WTF on that shipping.

100 USD for shipping? 😮 Where do you live? On the Moon?

Australia so pretty dang close to the moon.

Normally US shipping is fairly cheap but some sellers just set stupidly high shipping costs to make the selling price look better, they actuall make part of the sale from the high shipping. Its a shitty thing to do as a seller as some people dont bother looking at shipping before hitting the buy button.

I would expect this card to cost perhaps 25 - 30 USD to ship to Australia.

I seent something cool in Aus recently, that the shipping woulda been horrendous to break it out from prison island. I think it was an IBM PC Portable or early Compaq portable... IDK I was browsing a lot of random last week... on Aus eBay.

Are you paying "stupid" prices for hardware?

No, I'm pretty much done collecting for the most part. I have 5 486s (2DT, 3 LT), 2 Pentiums, a 286, and an 8088. Anything beyond that I can't justify owning because my modern machines running Linux fit that bill so well via virtual machines and/or emulation. Also, I don't even pay much for modern machines, I just take all the (3 years) "old" junk my family, friends, etc throw away, and hot rod the heck out of it, and get another 7-10 years out of it easy. I got into this hobby when it was VERY cheap (2001) and now the prices are kind of pricing me out, unless someone just throws me an old machine they don't want. If I won't keep it, I can usually find it a home, and if I charge for it, my prices are very reasonable.

Are you biding your time waiting for an ignorant soul?

I think the thought of an "ignorant soul" is subjective, and as you can see, I'm not really biding my time much with so much old-school goodness at hand. See, the #1 problem with our "interest" so to speak, is it's still not quite officiated yet in terms of finances, supply, demand, and realistic expectations.

On one hand we have people who think that all our old equipment is "worthless junk".
On another hand we have clickbait readers who think that all our stuff is a relative "goldmine".

Some people have old machines they truly want to see go to a good home, especially if they still work. It might be useless to them, but giving it away for free to that weirdo at work who loves old x86 IBM compatibles is a lot easier than taking it to a recycler/used computer shop either to be turned away or have to PAY to have the thing recycled. That's where I come in. And if I don't want the hardware, I'll sell it, at a reasonable cost, to someone like myself, and use the funds to upgrade my other vintage hardware, or gift it to a friend who wants to get into this sort of thing on actual hardware.

Are you working the flea markets?

I don't really actively seek anymore, fleas or otherwise. The well has pretty well dried up for my preferred vintage (8088-80486) locally, and when I do see such machines at a thrift shop, more often than not, people have caught on and often try to sell for stupid high prices, which I refuse to spend.

Usually if I buy something there, I bump into some machine they have had for months/years and have not been able to sell. I've bought 3 machines this way: a 386 DX-20 that I parted out in 2006, a 486 DX4-100 I used from 2008-2015, and lastly was a Gateway 2000 P5-100 I bought for $16 marked down from $60 because it sat in the store for a year and 3 months and would not move. I gave that Gateway 2000 away as a gift to a friend a year later who wanted to get into retro-computing.

Are you looking for broken junk and fixing it to run like new?

Old Junk is preferred because it's cheaper, and because I usually end up being able to build the machine out the way I want it. I'll take a $10 barebones 486 any day over a $1000 IBM PC 5150 all original with manuals.. Because that 5150, I'll likley "ruin" it by pulling one floppy, adding a HDD and a CD-ROM on an XT-IDE card, tossing in a RTC, by the time I'm done, it's a barebones 5150 all souped up and hot-rodded. That's half the fun for me in these old systems, pushing them to their limits. My last 3 were totally nasty when I got them....

Compaq Deskpro 386s/20 = yellowed plastic, open 5.25" bottom drive bay with nothing in it, missing cards, missing slot covers, 486 upgrade that was malfunctioning, and that's the best one.

Moondog 486 = working but noisy/bad CPU fan, dirty PSU, dirty case, motherboard dirty, digital readout misconfigured for 66MHz, no RAM, no HDD, no Cd-ROM, just a floppy drive.

K6 II System = dead motherboard that won't Post, CPU queationably good, noisy PSU, dirty case, case missing screws, all slot covers missing, possible bad PCI graphics card, missing VGA header for motherboard....

That's how I take them in, then I turn them into something special. And if I don't need/want it, I sell it/gift it for a reasonable price to the next guy who might give it a good home.

Are you looking back and saying "Man... these prices were a fraction of what there were just 6 months ago. I'm not paying that!"? Do you break eventually?

I look back further than that......when I started....

- Back in 2001-2005, everyone was throwing me their old "closet clutter". 386's, 486's, and early Pentiums (later on) for days on end. At one point I had 35 systems in my childhood garden shed neatly stacked, in various states of repair. More than half of it was free.

- Backing my truck up to the local Salvation Army and getting 3 IBM EduQuests and the rest of their "overstock" of old x86 machines, and getting PAID $15 for hauling it all away. Many of those systems are probably still out there being enjoyed as I sold a lot of them on e-bay for between $20-50 in the mid 00's.

- Meeting a guy who renovated apartment buildings for the local university, the inside of my Ford Explorer looked like the Back to the Future Delorean when I was done. Somewhere around 15-20 old PC's from 286-Pentium III, cables as far as the eye can see, keyboards upon keyboards upon keyboards, pointing devices, software....it was INSANE. Paid not a dime for it, tried to start a local computer business with it, when never got anywhere (it was too early).

- I had a friend at the time (and bandmate) whose second bedroom in his house looked like Computer Reset for awhile! He was teaching at a private school at the time....and both of us were snagging everything we could snag from thrift shops, the woods, street curbs, and messing with it.

I actually "sold out" in 2010 and got rid of (most) of everything but one 486, the Tandy 1000A, and 286 I have. But then the bug bit again when things "took off" in the 2010's and I never looked back. Now I'm back to having a nicely sized "creeping network" at this point, albeit probably running better than ever.

What is your bag?

Honestly, my top favorite era is the 486 era, and souping them up to ridiculous specs and making them work as "tweeners" practically, with a preference for NEC Versa in the laptop realm, and generic whiteboxes in the desktop realm. I can just about use a 486 DX4-100 as a daily driver under FreeDOS if it were not for YouTube, bills, and e-mail.

I also have a soft spot for early Compaq Deskpro and Tandy 1000 stuff as well. I love IBM but that stuff is just too expensive now, which is nuts because I remember a time I was kicking up another IBM PS/2 every other week, or some PS/ValuePoint or PC-330 486 (my favorite IBM branded 486 - the good ole Select-A-Bus). Heck, the friend I mentioned above nabbed a fully loaded Monochrome IBM PC XT with Hercules, a 720K drive, and the original packing cards for the drives, and Model "F" Keyboard in the box. He paid $30 for it in 2003.

But for the most part, my collecting days are well behind me because finding the space for all this stuff and reaching middle age is not a good recipe for good health. I do enough "heavy lifting" during the day working in I.T. I would love to own a house someday and have a room where I can curate everything all at once 100% functional so you can just walk up and play/work on these old machines, but I'm not sure when that'll ever be in the cards with my luck.

I consider myself pretty lucky that my dad had that hobby already when I was a child and now I live in an apartment that used to be his friends computer repair shop in the mid 90s. The guy went bancrupt and had to leave all the inventory here. When I moved in here it felt like living in a timecapsule/museum. 8086s 8088s 186s 286s 386s 486s pentiums from siemens, amd, intel, ti, cyrix, ibm by the boatload, and I mean literally...
I had to clear out that 3 room flat to make some space for my human self to live in here and so me and my dad decided roughly 6 years ago to move all of it in our barn.
It was 12 rides with a full trunk and trailer, computer parts, peripherals, complete ready to run systems from IBM, Acer, Commodore (PCs and others), Amigas, Schneider PCs, Robotron (Old eastern german soviet brand), Fujitsu/Siemens, Wang, various other AT and XT clones, even the occasional apple computer.

So I'm very very fortunate that I didn't have to pay a single penny for what moved into my personal collection.
But everything else that is left is quite a bit of a burden, since it is sitting in a barn, corroding away and my dad is very attached to it and selling parts so slowly that 90% of all the stuff will be broken and lost before he got rid of even 10% of all the stuff.
Especially the complete desktops and few towers as well as the monitors we have.
I can only take care of opening and cleaning and repairing one CRT per month or so, same goes for the desktops.

Honestly I don't know what to do...

Sorry it's maybe bit off topic to the main question here but I kind of had to get that off my chest and I couldn't think of a better place to do it.

As per the questions:
Are you paying "stupid" prices for hardware?
Only my brand new macbook pro M1 pro 14" that I treated myself for christmas, never bought new hardware before...
Are you biding your time waiting for an ignorant soul?
YES, sometimes 😀
Are you working the flea markets?
I would if it wasn't for covid... always keep my eyes open, but never really had seen anything I really wanted enough...
Are you looking for broken junk and fixing it to run like new?
I think If I ever saw something that I really wanted I'd first look if there is a broken unit that I can maybe fix... I mean after all this hobby is also a lot about preserving, isn't it?
Are you looking back and saying "Man... these prices were a fraction of what there were just 6 months ago. I'm not paying that!"? Do you break eventually?
I think the current market situation on "retro" and vintage computer parts do just reflect the crazy times we live in... every one is treating stuff like it was a tulip, bitcoin or weird NFT art...
I mean there is I think definitely sellers taking advantage of this.. but in the end it all comes down to this:
If you want that and if it makes you happy... why the hell not? Why else do you get out of bed in the morning and go to work every day if you can't spend your money on things that make you happy? (within the limits you know you have 😉
What is your bag?
Well in my personal collection are currently:
An IBM PS1000 Blue Lightning (pretty but terribly midrange)
An IBM PS/2 70 with a 386 and 14megs of ram, Kingston MCA memory board, 8514A Graphics card, 3Com Etherlink 2 card, a matching 12" color crt from IBM, the original Model M keyboard, sadly 7 years newer...
An IBM PS/2 30 with a 286, never ran it though because I didn't get to it yet.
A Commodore PC10 Model III with dual 5,25" Floppy drive, 512k of ram and a WORKING seagate AT/XT-Switchable IDE harddrive, I actually have two of these in case one of them fails one day, pretty rare I think these beasties
2 generic 486 builds that I currently work on to explore what they were able to do and also to play some games with my girlfriend on
And I plan on getting an AMD K6-III machine with preferably 550MHz but people seem to be crazy in commanding these prices for that CPU Ö_Ö

cheers audiocrush

Are you paying "stupid" prices for hardware?

No. Not for old or new hardware. There is hardware I lust over - rare hardware, not already in my collection - but my spending has limits, because of two reasons: I'm a husband and a father, and retro-computing is not my only hobby. Like a few other members of this community I'm also into classic cars, a hobby that's even more expensive and time consuming. Retro hardware prices have gone up quite a bit in the last 10 years, but you can still find interesting affordable retro hardware if you know where to look. New hardware - particularly video cards - have gone up in price in a ridiculous way too. I know it's not retro hardware talk but stay with me here, I believe it's still relevant. In 2018 I sold a couple of GTX 1080s for a little over 500 euro - today you'd be hard pressed to find one 1080 for sale for that kind of money. New card prices are insane. 700-800$ for a mid range RTX 3060? Hard pass. Picking up an old hardware magazine from say 2002-2003 and comparing prices makes it even worse. A Geforce 4 Ti 4200 from leadtek was ~210$. Adjusted for inflation that's around 300$. It's equivalent today would probably be the RTX 3070ti or 3080 - and those cost well over 1500 euro - at least in my country.... Consider this - I bought a damaged 2002 Land Rover Freelander for 520 euro last month. Since then I parted it out - the engine went for 500 euro. The gearbox for 200, IRD 140, AC lines alone sold for 80 euro. In total the car made me well over 2000 euro so far, not including the 190 euro I got at the salvage yard for the body and junk parts in scrap iron value, or the parts I still have not sold. So why would I spend over 1500 euro for a piece of hardware that sits in my computer and is only used at it's full capability once or twice a week? If new hardware is going to stay at this price level I'll be abandoning modern gaming and pursue retro computing alone.

Here are my reasons for not overpaying for retro hardware:
1. It's a rather niche hobby - not many people are into it, so the market is limited. This also means that there are not many people you can share this with. Go on, try it. Make a nice display case for your 3dfx card collection or your CPU collection, and see how your guests and friends react to it. They won't care. They won't understand why that funny looking green video card with two AAVID fans on it is going for 500-1000$, and why that is. Even those that are into hardware will ignore or even mock it. "That old thing? Really? Well can it run Crysis? 🤣"
2. The hardware is old and unreliable. A part may work today and die tomorrow. The condition of most retro hardware out there is questionable at best.
3. This hardware is obsolete. Most of it was due for the recycler years ago. It's use is niche and extremely limited. For the average Joe they're at best weird paper weights.
4. Retro hardware is not like gold or jewelry. Sure, some parts are worth good money, but good luck finding a seller for anything rare and expensive in a timely manner. If you slice prices from current market value to 2/3 or 1/2 you will be able to sell retro hardware quickly, but that just means it's true value is half of what we think it is, and 1/4 or less of what some ebay sellers ask in their auctions.
5. There's lots of ways to get retro hardware - even rare stuff for cheap if you're patient and are willing to dedicate some time to it. Local classifieds, flea markets, recycling centers, schools and public institutions, old retired techs, old computer repair shops are all great sources of retro hardware.
6. Trading. I got half of my rarer stuff via trade. 3DFX cards make great "currency", and so do ISA sound cards. You can even find collector's ads in classifieds. When I suspected a seller might be a fellow collector I'd ring him up and ask if he's looking for particular hardware and start up a trade. Forums are of course a great source for trade, but classifieds are your best bet for local trades.

Are you biding your time waiting for an ignorant soul?

Yes on both. You will occasionally come across people who are selling retro hardware without knowing it's value - but they're becoming harder and harder to find, and most of the hardware they sell is common run of the mill stuff. My collection is large enough, and I'm not in any hurry to buy anything in particular. The hardest part is browsing classifieds, going trough thousands of pages using very generic search terms, looking at blurry low res pictures trying to ascertain if that green thing with the silver heatsink is a voodoo 3 or a cheapo vanta/TNT 2 m64 with a AGP 2x connector. Are those pins bent? Is that a socket 3 PCI motherboard or a socket 5 / 7 board with DIP L2 cache sockets? Does it have missing ROM chips? And so on.

I guess the only thing missing from my collection witch I really want (since I lusted over one as a kid) is a working dual socket A motherboard. Other then that I'm pretty happy with what I have.

Are you working the flea markets?

Yes. Flea markets are a good place to pick up the magical "beige box" that can either contain dreamy hardware, or common junk. Will it work? Will it contain anything interesting?

Are you looking for broken junk and fixing it to run like new?

Yes. Old hardware is a lot easier to fix then modern ones. That goes for cars as well. Not everything can be fixed of course, but if the price is right and the part is interesting enough, I'll whip out my soldering station and my credit card and give it my best shot.

Are you looking back and saying "Man... these prices were a fraction of what there were just 6 months ago. I'm not paying that!"?

Sometimes yes.

Do you break eventually?

No. Never. I've specified in the first paragraphs why that is.

What is your bag?

Not a native English speaker, so i don't really understand this expression - but if it translates to "what kind of hardware do you like best" then that would be late 486 era (Socket 3 PCI motherboards and 5x86 CPUs) and socket 7 hardware, since that's what I grew up with - as well as 3d acceleration capable video cards.

See my first computer (a cyrix 586) had a 2d only video card, and I got that computer when it was low end hardware, but I loved every minute of using and upgrading it. But at one point, games started to required 3d capable video cards, and that's when old faithful could not cut it any more. My second computer wasn't much better, since it relied on an On board Trident Blade 3D video chipset with 8MB of shared memory - but it was 3D capable and introduced me to 3D games like Quake 2, Homeworld, Dungeon Keeper 2, Need For Speed V and many more. Sure, my 586 could run Quake and Tomb Raider under glide, but the performance was lackluster at best. Ah, Glide, Direct 3D, openGL, M3D, METAL, those were all new and exciting, and the hardware were beautiful silicon keys to these magical virtual worlds I would explore as a kid. I got my first part time job in middle school so I can buy a Voodoo 2 for my 586 - then a Radeon 7500 PCI for my K6-2. Then a geforce FX 5200 Ultra for my Duron (not much of an upgrade over the 7500, but at least the PCI bottleneck was gone), a radeon 9600 later on, then a 6600GT AGP, from that to a X800 PRO AGP witch I modded to an X800 XT by unlocking from 12 to 16 pipelines. After that came the 7900GT, and later the mind-blowing 8800GTX witch I remember I spent a fortune on and got as soon as it launched. Bought an 650W Antec Truepower PSU with it too so I could power the card properly. Each one of those cards unlocked new experiences for me, and that's something I remember fondly to this day.

Mine is I want it now, and I don't care if the price is $5 more (insert common part here) or $50 more (insert rare part here) more than what I "should" pay. I pay whatever the market is going for; usually more because I want the best condition I can find; more so with boxes and paperwork.

I don't care about condition as long as it works. And sometimes I don't even care if it works. If it's a voodoo 2 I'll buy it even if it's dead - but only if the price is right. Just last week I got a dead STB Voodoo 2 for 7 euro - and it was missing an SMD 10uf capacitor - along with the pads it sat on. After a bit of soldering I managed to install a trough hole cap by using it's legs to bridge the closest traces to where the pads used to be, and the card works flawlessly. And if that didn't fix it I'd just remove the 3dfx chips to solder onto some of my other dead v2 cards - cards with good PCBs and bad chips.

Do you have a line that you won't cross?

Yes. And it's always price related. This is not a glamorous hobby - nobody will appreciate you spending 1000$ on a voodoo 5 5500 or a 300$ on an original Sound Blaster PRO 2.0 - they'll just think you're nuts or have more money then brains. Reselling retro hardware isn't easy either. I remember in 2017 when my wife was pregnant with our son, I put half my 3dfx collection for sale and had two options - get half of what they were worth and sell them, or keep them at collector prices and risk them selling whenever - so I cut my prices because we needed the money. My e30 325i coupe had to go as well. Since then I was able to get another E30 for decent money and in arguably better condition then my old one was - this time a sedan - witch suits me just fine, having 4 doors makes it easy to put a child seat in, and my son loves to ride in it - but I haven't been able to find a voodoo rush since then (for an acceptable price) and voodoo 5 5500s are stupid money now so I'll be passing on that.

Very good topic. I just checked my spending for the last year with this "hobby"~ couple thosands USD, which is a bit higher than what I expected.

Are you paying "stupid" prices for hardware?

Not really, but I managed to get access to more old hardware at reasonable prices, thus spending more overall.

I only once paid ~ 120 USD for an Intel AN430TX board, it's a stupid price, but I had to have the OPL4-ML wavetable.

Are you biding your time waiting for an ignorant soul?

Never. It's too much wasted time, and the competition is fierce 😀

Are you working the flea markets?

Not anymore, too much time and effort is needed. I did it, found some hardware at low prices, but the effort to wake up 2 times a week at 5AM to be there first was too much, after 5 - 6 months of doing it 😁.

Are you looking for broken junk and fixing it to run like new?
Not really. I need to spend huge amounts of time to get up to speed on fixing / soldering. However, I am getting there; I came to realize that one needs some knowledge of electronics / hardware / fixing minor faults.

Are you looking back and saying "Man... these prices were a fraction of what there were just 6 months ago. I'm not paying that!"? Do you break eventually?
Only for exceptional, rare hardware, and some 3dfx cards.

What is your bag?

MIDI and audio. Once Serge gets some nice hardware out, my wallet is in pain 😁

Do you have a line that you won't cross?

Usually I have a hard limit of 100 USD on purchases of old stuff. It appears not to be of much help 😁

I don't think I had any fantastic deals for the retro items I've collected... It took a long time to find stuff for the right price even at that time, several years ago, before the heated market. Paid a fair amount of money for everything. A couple instances of good deals on great items were with people I recognize from Vogons.

I don't consider myself active on 90's stuff anymore, because of the market. I'd generalize that it's probably different people with slightly different motivations collecting and pushing the market now compared to ten years ago.

I occasionally pay over the odds for something but for the most part look for things that need some TLC or fixing and I steer away from dedicated retro dealers.
I've had some cool finds from the 'ignorant souls' in general bric-a-brac sellers i.e. yesterday I bought an Amstrad PPC512 8086 portable for £54 listed as parts from a store that had all sorts of random junk. They said the machine wouldn't boot from the start up disk. The start up disk was in the listing pics on a 1.44mb floppy. To the best of my knowledge, these machines have 720k drives, which would explain the issue. So best case, it will just work, worst case.. hoping maybe they need new belts or a drive replacement. Machine comes with all the bits and it's original laptop baggy so I'm hoping for a complete working bargain 😁 it has a crappy little lcd but outputs nice colour CGA to and external monitor.
I have had a lot of luck looking for stuff this way and find it keeps a lid on my cashflow if I spend my evenings hunting for bargains rather than drooling over desirables.
I don't do flea markets but do get good stuff on local classifieds, I look once a day and have had some good scores, retro stuff still shows up every couple of months.
No particular bag, if I'm curious, I get it. I once bought a mobile cassette driven barcode scanner from the 70's, don't know why but it was cheap so not a big deal to get, I just like to look at it and may get it working one day if I can find info on it. It was made by MSI which made me curious but turns out to be a different company, not a fledgling micro star international product.
I probably wouldn't go over £50 for a component or £100 for a system.

Are you paying "stupid" prices for hardware?

No.

Are you biding your time waiting for an ignorant soul?

Not really

Are you working the flea markets?

I do normally, but I haven't the last few years due to covid (there mostly either just weren't any or I didn't go because of other reasons of which one is (lack of) transport)
I have visited some second hand stores the last few years but only a couple times literally.

Are you looking for broken junk and fixing it to run like new?

I am looking for broken junk, but mostly by combining with a walk around the neighborhood. Veeery occasionally I'll find something useful, but if I find a dumped computer once a year it would be a lot.
I started by looking at broken junk and only started purchasing items to fill in the gaps. But these days I barely ever buy any retro items anymore and part of the reason is because of crazy prices and another is that there's little that I'd still 'need'.
Because early in my collection days I already realized it is important to understand there's a difference to wanting an item because I needed it (for some build for example or as spare parts) or because I just like buying stuff. I call this the xmas present feeling of opening a package and getting excited and then tossing said item into storage and forgetting you have it but you keep buying more stuff and this I wanted to prevent from happening right from the start.

Are you looking back and saying "Man... these prices were a fraction of what there were just 6 months ago. I'm not paying that!"? Do you break eventually?

More like "these prices were a fraction of what they were 10 years ago, can often add a zero behind old prices and then add another 1 in front of the old price".
I don't sell anything (or not yet anyway), but I also barely spend anything either. So yes, I break even (almost).

What is your bag?

I don't know what this means.

Classic Chanel, Louis Vuitton or more accessible Coach or Kate Spade???.... oh not purses... guess the usual meaning then, "What's your thing?", "What in particular do you like?", "What's your way of being?" that sort of thing.

firage wrote on 2022-02-15, 01:41:

I don't think I had any fantastic deals for the retro items I've collected... It took a long time to find stuff for the right price even at that time, several years ago, before the heated market. Paid a fair amount of money for everything. A couple instances of good deals on great items were with people I recognize from Vogons.

I don't consider myself active on 90's stuff anymore, because of the market. I'd generalize that it's probably different people with slightly different motivations collecting and pushing the market now compared to ten years ago.

I would not at all be surprised if this is the case.

I've definitely also paid a fair amount of money for all the stuff I ever bought, if only because of shipping costs. But also because of the sheer amount of items that I purchased and because I was also less picky like when someone was trying to rid themselves off all their retro stuff, I'd take anything with most items being like geforce mx level stuff or proprietary oem junk.
These days prices are way beyond my typical budget, I'd need to sell stuff in order to buy anything and that just doesn't give me the same kick anymore. These days different people will get a kick out of this hobby, mostly because prices are much higher and the hobby is more popularized by mainstream media (but it still remains a niche).

I started because it was cheap and because of nostalgia, these days people may start because they are also nostalgic but not because it's cheap because it isn't anymore.
I'd guess there's more people collecting these days, but there's also old collectors that are not active anymore. Overall it will be rewarding for a different reason compared to 10 years ago, which will also attract different people that get a kick out of something somewhat different.

I could take a guess, perhaps these days part of the people collecting do it because of the rarity or because there's much more money in this world of trade compared to 10 to 15 years ago.
It's difficult to explain:
15 years ago this was basically just obsolete (and sometimes maybe even chemically not 100% environmentally safe), it's electronics so it needs special care and it weighs a lot and takes up a lot of space. So it took up lots of space, there was tons of it so people wanted to move it asap.
I reckon this attracted people with often little money, with more of a disregard for popular opinion. You really needed to push away from popular opinion more that you were hoarding old junk, you'd be frowned upon much more often compared to 2022, more people thought collecting old hardware was in essence just pathetic except never calling it by such strong words. They would really look down on it, for real. Also people could assume you collect old electronics, so you must be some kind of IBM engineer or something because why else would you even have all that old stuff?
People in general didn't know computers very well back then, it was much more alien.

These days it's much easier to explain, you can just send your whatsapp friend a link to LRG just to name something seemingly random 😜
It's more costly, information is much more readily available, tons of tutorial about how to start your retro collection, it's much more popularized and the expensiveness will be bound to attract a different kind of people as well.
There's still a lot of the older folks around who probably grew into their current roles with new fresh collectors taking their place as they are now discovering and experimenting with stuff that the old garde was toying around with 15 years ago. The new tinkerers will have a lot more information available and this could also attract people with a different mindset.
I could hypothesize that it's arguably easier to get going with retro PC building and now that it's more accessible, it now may be drawing in people who would not have bothered with this hobby 15 years ago. But because of increased prices and decreased availability people need to be more picky. People also have gotten more picky alogn with some particular parts having gained a lot of popularity because of how good they can be (3dfx just to name something everyone here will probably recognize) but this popularity wasn't there 15 years ago so prices were not high either. Those parts were just as good but not as popularized back then as they are now.

I could even speculate that even traders are different now from back then, they also gained much more knowledge. This market evolved along with it.
One thing that has changed (and imo is actually really nice to see) is that the higher prices, lower availability and higher appreciation of old computer parts have made it more compelling for people to actually try and repair their broken stuff instead of tossing it into the bin of they don't like it.

PC gaming and hardware is generally also much less accessible compared to for instance consoles. I'd reckon that virtually everybody here on vogons will have at least some degree of interest in old tech or old games. This hasn't really changed over the years. What has changed is the prices and the wages of the people who are currently getting into the hobby except the people that already had a collection who can trade stuff to get new stuff, their hobby also pays for their hobby so they would not need better wages.
But afaics what has not changed is people still tinkering with old hardware in some way.

I'm pretty sure I forgot half I wanted to mention and these early morning replies are always ... I forgot what I wanted to mention. I need to go make some breakfast 🤣. And a coffee xD

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-17, 05:33:

Classic Chanel, Louis Vuitton or more accessible Coach or Kate Spade???.... oh not purses... guess the usual meaning then, "What's your thing?", "What in particular do you like?", "What's your way of being?" that sort of thing.

I was reading this

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, ...

as this

Unicorn hoarding operations are proceeding, ...

🤣

Anyway, I look up this
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2 … s-your-bag-mean

What does the phrase "What's your bag?" mean? Asked 6 years, 2 months ago Active 3 years, 5 months ago Viewed 16k times […]
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What does the phrase "What's your bag?" mean?
Asked 6 years, 2 months ago
Active 3 years, 5 months ago
Viewed 16k times

10

What does the phrase "What's your bag?" mean in the following 2 sentences:

I tweeted to the Yahoo help center, and they replied:
- Hey man, what's your bag?

At a party, someone asked me:
- So, what's your bag?

I know the first sentence means that Yahoo was trying to find out the problem I was having.

But The second sentence is confusing me. I went to a party, and there someone asked me "So what's your bag?" but I did not have any problem and I did not ask for help.

Can you explain what the second sentence represents?

meaning
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edited Dec 16 2015 at 16:39

user1359
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asked Dec 16 2015 at 13:54

Amit Verma
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Why didn't you ask him? If someone speaks in riddles, it is normal to ask what he means. –
rogermue
Dec 16 2015 at 17:38
In the expression "What's your bag?" the meaning is likely "What's your 'thing'?" or "What things do you really like?" Though there are likely contexts where it could have a different meaning. –
Hot Licks
Dec 16 2015 at 17:53
2
That's not my bag, baby! –
Kevin
Dec 16 2015 at 19:32
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6 Answers

14

I would interpret this anachronistic question as hipster-speak for:

So, what are your interests, employment, education, religion, and/or life goals?

Basically this person is trying to determine whether you would make a valuable acquaintance or possibly sexual partner based on mutual interests.

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answered Dec 16 2015 at 14:02

Eric Hauenstein
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All the answers are valid, this seems to be the most inclusive answer. –
Arluin
Dec 16 2015 at 23:22
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6

It is a slang expression from the 60's:

Bag:

To Steal. Example: Who bagged my towel? ;
Also; "What's your bag" meaning what's your problem or where are you coming from.
(www.cougartown.com)

For the second sentence it may refer to:

Bag:

Slang An area of interest or skill: Cooking is not my bag

Yes, I did that too. If an online auction for a nice item ended at 1€, I payed the seller 10€ or so.
In such cases, I told the seller that the extra money is a compensation for "packaging cost".
You know, glue, paper, the used cardboard box.. 😉
The sellers often understood that this was just meant as an excuse to be able to pay more money and save face.

The reactions were all positive, from what I can remember.
I mean, it wasn't much extra money. But the fact that there are people out there who give more than necessary must kind of have restored their faith in humanity or something. 😀

Tetrium wrote on 2022-02-17, 06:01:

I started because it was cheap and because of nostalgia, these days people may start because they are also nostalgic but not because it's cheap because it isn't anymore.

I started because of COVID-19. Spending too much time at home brings some quite weird ideas to mind. 😄

My idea was to collect some PC platform laptops capable of working under pure MS-DOS with plenty of peripherals to play with them at weekends after COVID-19 period will end. In the end, besides having few different models of PC compatible laptops I have now also Epson HX-20 and Tandy Models 100 and 102 and keep on looking for even more weird computers. It has to be noticed that I have no idea how those Epson and Tandy dinosaurs even work. More than that, only a year ago or so I discovered their existence. 😂So no nostalgia thing here at all.

The only limit I keep on not crossing - is collecting only laptops to keep my living space continue being clean. Today I have around 30 laptops and only one portable Dolch and one regular Midi-Tower.

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2022-02-20, 00:25:

I started because of COVID-19. Spending too much time at home brings some quite weird ideas to mind. 😄 […]
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Tetrium wrote on 2022-02-17, 06:01:

I started because it was cheap and because of nostalgia, these days people may start because they are also nostalgic but not because it's cheap because it isn't anymore.

I started because of COVID-19. Spending too much time at home brings some quite weird ideas to mind. 😄

My idea was to collect some PC platform laptops capable of working under pure MS-DOS with plenty of peripherals to play with them at weekends after COVID-19 period will end. In the end, besides having few different models of PC compatible laptops I have now also Epson HX-20 and Tandy Models 100 and 102 and keep on looking for even more weird computers. It has to be noticed that I have no idea how those Epson and Tandy dinosaurs even work. More than that, only a year ago or so I discovered their existence. 😂So no nostalgia thing here at all.

The only limit I keep on not crossing - is collecting only laptops to keep my living space continue being clean. Today I have around 30 laptops and only one portable Dolch and one regular Midi-Tower.

Covid definitely caused everything to draw a new set of cards, so to say. For instance purchasing a bike became something completely different as bikes became unavailable because in The Netherlands everybody wanted a new bike all at once because they spend more time at home with everything closed because of the lockdowns (so nowhere to go, all gyms closed, more free time and more money to spend with much fewer things to spend it on).

Covid definitely gave the trend of increasing retro prices a real boost, 🤣.

Tetrium wrote on 2022-02-20, 11:50:

... so nowhere to go, all gyms closed

During COVID period I've lost around 5 kg without a gym or any other physical activity. You will ask me "how?". Just started to eat less. 🤣

ThinkpadIL wrote on 2022-02-20, 12:48:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-02-20, 11:50:

... so nowhere to go, all gyms closed

During COVID period I've lost around 5 kg without a gym or any other physical activity. You will ask me "how?". Just started to eat less. 🤣

Might be seen as a bit of a radical approach to be able to afford current retro hardware prices to just pay less for food 😜

Tetrium wrote on 2022-02-20, 14:51:

Might be seen as a bit of a radical approach to be able to afford current retro hardware prices to just pay less for food 😜

That's true... 😄