I have more or less same interest in computers all my life, build or collect, is same. I start collection computer stuff in early-mid 90s and since, i always keep same interest

With all those hardware sound card and other projects, it seems to have changed gear from how it was 20 or even 10 years ago. Prices seem higher than ever. The demographics... people who were aged 6-30 in 2000 (which might be the cohort most likely to remember 486/Pentium hardware from a time when they looked on either excitedly or enviously)... would be 30-55 now, so plenty of people who have the time and interest - and money - for a while yet. Once you get beyond 60, you then have a possible resurgence of interest with more time on your hands... So it could easily continue for another decade or two... And that's just thinking about PCs pre-98, there is still interest in even (much) older computing hardware.

... against that is the continuing growth and improvement in emulators which makes the old PC hardware unnecessary for purely running old games on new systems (which is what Very-Old-Games-On-New-Systems was originally about as the dosbox forum).

TLDR: absolutely no idea, what will be will be.

Yes, and there are a few immutable factors contributing to that....

1. Old PC hardware availability (CPU/mobo/complete vintage systems/whatever)has decreased significantly, while old PC software remains easily available or grows steadily. What's around may be functional to some degree or going bad/gone bad. This isn't going to change and it's just the way things go. Unless someone starts pooping out retro x86 PC CPUs/board combos to use with retro software or older hardware gets refurbed by one or more players, there's going to be a collapse of the old PC hardware market.

2. The game industry has gotten the message about retro gaming and is remastering/source porting everything it can to modern hardware, making old hardware less necessary and attractive.

3. The emulator scene remains as horny as it as ever been, so again, the shift to modern hardware is moving along at a solid pace.

I'd say the interest is as high as ever. I often buy - sell late 486/ Pentium era stuff on the big site as I build up/experiment. If anything I think the interest in hardware always seem to be at it's peak whilst it is turning into unobtainium

ratfink wrote on 2024-09-28, 17:54:

With all those hardware sound card and other projects, it seems to have changed gear from how it was 20 or even 10 years ago. Prices seem higher than ever. The demographics... people who were aged 6-30 in 2000 (which might be the cohort most likely to remember 486/Pentium hardware from a time when they looked on either excitedly or enviously)... would be 30-55 now, so plenty of people who have the time and interest - and money - for a while yet. Once you get beyond 60, you then have a possible resurgence of interest with more time on your hands... So it could easily continue for another decade or two... And that's just thinking about PCs pre-98, there is still interest in even (much) older computing hardware.

Agreed. I'm right in the middle of that 30-55 cohort, and to me, part of the interest in retro hardware is the fact that modern hardware... just stopped being exciting. Ironically, just as people in this age cohort would have the kind of money to spend on computer components that we didn't really have in our youths.

The modern gaming/enthusiast PC is basically composed of the following elements:
- a CPU with peak power consumption higher than a Hotburst
- a GPU with an eye-popping price tag
- no expansion bays/slots/etc except the bare minimum required for the GPU
- NVMe storage
- some random Intel HD Audio Realtek chip on the motherboard
- enough USB ports to actualize the 1980s Mac/Steve Jobs vision that all expansion should be external, rather than the Traditional PC Way of internal expansion
- network connectivity that's barely gotten faster than two decades ago's gigabit Ethernet, along with potentially wifi which is just... inappropriate... in a desktop machine

That's it. When you look at those things, the expectation is that you'll potentially upgrade your GPU, but nothing else will ever be released that might need a 3.5", 5.25" bay or a PCI-E expansion slot.

And really, every generation is taking stuff away - floppy drives, optical drives, card readers, sound cards, hardware wavetable MIDI, random other storage media, etc - all gone. All reduced to CPU, GPU, NVMe, and cooling.

And where's the excitement in that? And really, doesn't that describe a PS5 just as well as a modern PC - a PS5 has CPU, GPU, NVMe and cooling too.

The vintage stuff just represents... innovation... and coolness in a way the modern stuff doesn't. e.g. when I was building my 98SE rig with an Audigy 2 ZS, I got to play with some of the cool SB Live/Audigy effects (e.g. the gender changing effect) for the first time since, oh, 2006. That stuff was cool and innovative in a way that some Realtek el-cheapo onboard thing... just isn't. And it was moving so quickly. You went from an SB Live to an SB Audigy to an SB X-Fi in each of your subsequent systems, and each one was more or less better than the previous. Same with, say, optical drives, going from CD-ROM to CD-RW to DVD to DVD burning. Same with networking - I went from 10 megabit Ethernet to gigabit in the course of about... oh, 6-7 years... and it took me 18 years after that and a huge insane amount of money to finally get a 10 gig network at home.

And nothing has really replaced the turn-of-the-millennium PC as a... canvas... for excitement. Smartphones or smartwatches are nice, sure, and I love my iPhone Pro Max and my Apple Watch and whatnot, but... those things are highly-integrated products set in stone, that you'll never open up and add some exciting add-on or other to. Same thing on the software front - anybody remember customizing the hell out of Winamp? And today you instead have your Spotify client...

I usually laugh to overprized stuff post ISA era. Somehow a nice i5 with ability to run Windows 7 to 11. But a P4 slow space heater is somehow more valuable.

I’m very new to this hobby. I think interest in retro PC hardware is increasing and so prices of hardware is increasing. 10 months ago it didn’t occur to me that the computers I used in my childhood and teens was classified as “retro” until I watched one of Phil’s videos. It then dawned on me that I could build the machines I used to play on and experience a little of what I used to feel back in the day. I could now own all the hardware my parents wouldn’t buy me and what I couldn’t afford to buy.

A Voodoo 2, 15 years ago cost about $40, they now go for around $300. In a few years from now $300 will be considered a bargain.

I think more and more people are going to start their mid life crisis soon 😉

Cyberdyne wrote on 2024-09-29, 09:31:

I usually laugh to overprized stuff post ISA era. Somehow a nice i5 with ability to run Windows 7 to 11. But a P4 slow space heater is somehow more valuable.

Most P4 systems will run anything from Windows NT 4.0 up to 7, or even 10/11 if the CPU has the right features.

I don't know if we might get a secondary wave of nostalgia for the Gen Z that between noughts and about 2012 when they might have got tablets, maybe got given or let loose on "the old computer" Win 98 or early XP machine maybe. I know some of the kids in the fam here got to mess around with stuff from that era and whatever was randomly installed on them..... though since minecraft was fairly lightweight initially, it's possible that that will be tied into GenZ nostalgia when it got put on older machines for them.

In my case, the reason is likely that I don't find tinkering around with hardware as fun as I used to and this is one of the reasons I got into VOGONS around 13 years ago. I also started to look down on the ever increasing stupidity of people who are into this hobby for either money or a fix to their self-esteem issues.

It's not VOGONS' fault, but rather the massification of (un)social media and YouTube, and the recurrent "I must have more than you, you're less than me" picture of miserable 40 year olds on Facebook that brings up the kind of "I don't want to be like this people" thoughts in my mind (I insist guys... not directed to anyone here 😜).

Perhaps, having just graduated from college at 28 and pursuing a post-grad also means I am at a stage of my life I simply look forward to some of the new I could never do before, rather than the usual old.

Is everything in this hobby about money? Only if you let it be.

For I, will go back to playing some of my Win9x games on my 1400-s/Obsidian2/SB16/A3D and enjoy helping my friends and fellow Vogoners trying to get their systems and games up and running.

I am happy that values got over scrap values, and want them to stay ahead, because it means these things are saved and appreciated. Thinking of all the engineering effort and ingenuity that went into the lowliest 8088 or the fastest Haswell (think that's about height of where retro sensibilities are currently stopping.) and seeing them scrapped and pulverised, is like seeing people burning books. However, things have got a bit silly in some instances, and you can have fun on a very small budget.

But yeah, I leave a lot of that social media alone, if I look on youtube, it's for what has been done with a particular thing, rather than getting worked up about what the latest new old thing is by catching every latest video.

My problem is I’ve got about 200 games that won’t work on a modern system and I have very slow success with emulators so next best is real hardware but what doesn’t land in tech museums, enthusiasts, and hoarders ends up in landfill or e-waste the pool is shrinking.
I’d love there to be a hardware project that covers the pre millennium era.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-29, 15:29:

I am happy that values got over scrap values, and want them to stay ahead, because it means these things are saved and appreciated. Thinking of all the engineering effort and ingenuity that went into the lowliest 8088 or the fastest Haswell (think that's about height of where retro sensibilities are currently stopping.) and seeing them scrapped and pulverised, is like seeing people burning books.

That's how it more or less always goes with collectable things. Tons of now-desirable vintage cars have been scrapped and pulverised, too...

The thing is - people at the time just can't imagine that something that is no longer that great at its primary function will eventually be desirable as a nostalgia thing. That creative solutions will be engineered around some of the limitations (e.g. things like the Gotek floppy emulators, the FloppyEmus for Macs, the BlueSCSIs, etc... and there are plenty of automotive equivalents too) that will give the vintage hardware some of the benefits of more modern approaches. And, frankly, that sometimes the people who desire it as a nostalgia thing are people who were too young to have encountered it in active use, and so for them, without any trauma from the daily use of the thing, it just has a certain vintage coolness that it doesn't have to the older folks.

But part of the problem is that it takes... ~15-20 years... for that to happen. Many people don't have the room to store things just out of some hope that they'll become collectible two decades later. The thing that astounds me the most - vintage Mac enthusiasts now chasing SEs. My family had an SE, it was... a challenge... getting rid of it in 1995. Now, thirty years later, the ones whose clock batteries haven't exploded and trashed the motherboard are... valuable. Including, ironically, the floppy-only model likes ours - the hard drives in the hard drive models are dead anyways, BlueSCSI is a better solution, so nothing wrong with a dual-floppy model. If you had told me 30 years ago that someday, kids barely older than I was at the time would be excited about a floppy-only SE, I would have sent you to a neurologist.

One last thing I'd be curious about - lots of Ivy Bridge hardware in the marketplace today. My guess is that it's relatively difficult to sell an Ivy Bridge system, because, well, most of the potential buyers are not thinking 'retro XP system', they're thinking 'why would I buy a 10 year old gaming PC'? And I suspect that for every ivy bridge that gets rehomed as a retro system, 5-10 get scrapped and pulverized.
(For the record, I did my part, I rescued a friend's Ivy Bridge desktop... I just wish I had managed to rescue his 1GHz titanium PowerBook G4 15 years ago...)

I think interest in retro hardware peaked? I think a lot of people (including myself) got a bit carried away during COVID. IMHO some of the pressure on the market from that has come off. For example, I've been eyeballing a Voodoo 3 on ebay for years and years now. And I think, just from casually keeping an eye on it, that the sale price I see has slowly crept down from $200+ to $150-ish? I donno, maybe I'm imagining it.

That said, certain vintage parts have more or less completely dried up. CRTs are just insane and scarce. I haven't seen one on a local listing for ages now, where as even 4 years ago once or twice a year I'd see people just giving them away locally. Motherboards remain the most scarce and expensive part to get just because I think they are most likely to fail or be scrapped. But on the flip side, that ebay listing for that massive lot of NOS K6-2+ 570's is still going strong, 3 for $65 or whatever it is. Showed up right as those CPUs were getting rare-ish, and now there is a virtually inexhaustible supply.

I do question whether there will be interest in retro hardware from the 2010's. I wasn't a kid then, but it all seems so boring. And hardware will be the least of their problems trying to re-experience the software of their childhood. Most of it was service based, and those will be shut down. It's gonna suck wanting to "go back" as a child of the 2010's, because there will be nothing to go back to. Nothing to share with your own children.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-29, 12:04:

I don't know if we might get a secondary wave of nostalgia for the Gen Z that between noughts and about 2012 when they might have got tablets, maybe got given or let loose on "the old computer" Win 98 or early XP machine maybe. I know some of the kids in the fam here got to mess around with stuff from that era and whatever was randomly installed on them..... though since minecraft was fairly lightweight initially, it's possible that that will be tied into GenZ nostalgia when it got put on older machines for them.

Gen Z here.
Some people of the younger generations are certainly going to take an interest in stuff from the 70s-90s, but it's rare. The time period I collect is mainly early 90s-late 2000s. I know of a handful of others around my age who are into the same stuff I am, but it's not that many. That's how it goes for just about any hobby though.
Don't be surprised when in 5-10 years you see a bunch of younger folks ogling over Vista/Win7-era Core 2 Duo machines. It may seem completely insane, but someone would have said the same thing 15 years ago about people collecting Pentium IIIs.

3lectr1c wrote on 2024-09-29, 18:26:

Don't be surprised when in 5-10 years you see a bunch of younger folks ogling over Vista/Win7-era Core 2 Duo machines. It may seem completely insane, but someone would have said the same thing 15 years ago about people collecting Pentium IIIs.

Well, it's insane for a different reason - if you want a Win7 machine, there are plenty of newer, higher-performing options than the C2D.

(And yes, had you told me that people would be collecting Pentium IIIs 15 years ago, I would have kept my Dell 440BX/Coppermine system... *sigh*)

VivienM wrote on 2024-09-29, 18:46:

3lectr1c wrote on 2024-09-29, 18:26:

Don't be surprised when in 5-10 years you see a bunch of younger folks ogling over Vista/Win7-era Core 2 Duo machines. It may seem completely insane, but someone would have said the same thing 15 years ago about people collecting Pentium IIIs.

Well, it's insane for a different reason - if you want a Win7 machine, there are plenty of newer, higher-performing options than the C2D.

(And yes, had you told me that people would be collecting Pentium IIIs 15 years ago, I would have kept my Dell 440BX/Coppermine system... *sigh*)

Well, in the same light - a Pentium II makes a much faster system for Windows 95 than a Pentium 1, but plenty of people still collect Pentium 1s. You are right though - my go-to Windows 7 machines are all Sandy/Ivy Bridge stuff, although I have some C2D machines around because I like them too, mainly the rest of the hardware package.

3lectr1c wrote on 2024-09-29, 18:26:

Gen Z here.
Some people of the younger generations are certainly going to take an interest in stuff from the 70s-90s, but it's rare. The time period I collect is mainly early 90s-late 2000s. I know of a handful of others around my age who are into the same stuff I am, but it's not that many. That's how it goes for just about any hobby though.

Glad to see younger folks here. As a photographer, however, I remember the frenzy of lomography a few years ago (that destroyed many good E-6 reversal slide films by developing in C-41 formulae) and the more recent surge of old compact camera using CCD sensor (with much smaller scale though). The much steeper learning curve of retro computing (all you need are compatible batteries and film cartridges / memory cards for a working film / CCD compact camera; the rest is just point and click) unavoidably limits its popularity.

3lectr1c wrote on 2024-09-29, 18:26:

Don't be surprised when in 5-10 years you see a bunch of younger folks ogling over Vista/Win7-era Core 2 Duo machines. It may seem completely insane, but someone would have said the same thing 15 years ago about people collecting Pentium IIIs.

The first NetBurst (Willamette) P4 1.4 GHz was released in November 2000. The last NetBurst Pentium D 935 was released in January 2007. That was just a bit more than six years apart.

And Intel has been producing Core for 18 years; half of it has been a "Laker". 😉 Software side, the newest Win11 still uses the same NT6 core infrastructure introduced by Vista 17 years ago; all the differences between versions are just superficial optimizations.

IMHO collecting earlier Pentiums or other vintage CPUs is like climbing another mountain, while collecting Core era CPUs is just like moving to another point on a big plateau.

3lectr1c wrote on 2024-09-29, 21:02:

Well, in the same light - a Pentium II makes a much faster system for Windows 95 than a Pentium 1, but plenty of people still collect Pentium 1s. You are right though - my go-to Windows 7 machines are all Sandy/Ivy Bridge stuff, although I have some C2D machines around because I like them too, mainly the rest of the hardware package.

Sure, but as someone who is trying to acquire a Pentium 1 (and failing miserably), I would say they're being collected as DOS machines, not Win95 and definitely not Win98. That being said, I ran Win95 on much, much slower than a Pentium 1 back in the day, so... a Pentium 1 with a civilized amount of RAM and CF card storage ought to make a decent enough Win95 machine, although, yes, there are plenty of better options.

Don't get me wrong, I love the C2D/C2Q, especially the 45nm variants. At one point my entire family was running 45nm C2D/C2Qs, and I think I had... 3... of my own. Still have one of those that I've owned since 2008 that I dug out of the closet after 6 years to turn into a retro XP machine... and then discovered this forum, rescued my friend's Ivy Bridge, and put it back in the closet. Probably the greatest x86 processor family ever launched. But... unless you have a near unobtainium i865 C2-capable motherboard, the C2D/C2Q is a bit too new for easy Win98SE, and it's a bit too old for a late XP box. And it's definitely too old for a solid retro Vista/7 box.