As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.

— Denis Diderot, "Encyclopédie" (1755)
[/quote]

VIVE LA REVOLUtION!

I wouldn't say interest is decreasing....but the rarer hardware is. Gobbled up by collectors like myself and many others. I have a lot of rare stuff, my favorite period is mid 90's through early 2000's. Much prior to that is pretty useless for my interests and much after just hasn't 'earned its stripes' yet. The point being, if the hardware you're insterested in building is just impossible to find; knowing you'll likely never obtain it, interest fades away.

We could just be on the cusp of another availability spike. The "well established curious dude" of age 30 to 40 who could afford to dabble in PCs 1985 though the 90s, is getting to the age of mortality or family packing them off into a care home, so their equipment may be coming on the market in the next 5 years. I think that will include a lot of engineer types who didn't buy mass market trash and kept their stuff in good order. Having said that, I guess there's a few members here who might think we're eyeballing them for a coffin fitting 🤣 but yeah, a lot of us are only a decade or two behind.

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-03-06, 18:51:

One thing for sure , we live in a time unprecedented in history. Barring a terrible disaster we will really be the first generation in history where the common man will be remembered more clearly than even the rulers of previous ages. History was written by the few and most people are forgotten, but as the first generation in history to so fully document itself through the internet we will live on in a way no common man has ever done before.

They will still get things wrong about us but our thoughts will live on for reflection.

I have a couple business/investment ideas along these lines. If you want to invest hit me up.

I'm not even sure that's as true as it seems. How much of the internet has vanished forever? all those livestreamed lives from various video services, will they stay up forever? i cant imagine every youtube video being available 50 years from now, let alone all the other services, blogs etc. Individually, masses of data can rapidly disappear into obscurity - those people perpetually photographing everything rarely look at their own photos, other people hardly ever do and will companies really host it all in cloud for ever? I suspect a few AI training scans and a decade later and it'll start being deleted by small print provisions

Sure that still leaves a lot more detail than we have about 100 years back, even 30 years back really!

But overall, the aggregate picture of the ordinary life is captured like never before - but through the lens of the internet, not the actual day to day life of billions of people, that will leave a skewed picture of life. It will be like watching a tv drama about some period we lived through, where we think "well, it was a bit like that - but its off somehow, too much of x, too little of y, they missed a completely and added b that didn't really happen", only more skewed still.

Possibly the individual data will be gone, replaced only by 'trained' databases that have long reduced everything to generalities with occasional variances in accuracy. whatever happens the abundance of data will hinder as much as it helps form a picture of the past

the link with retro pc interest is there too, a lot of our retro pcs are not accurate examples of the past - putting XP on quad cores, 98se on a HT P4, and having everything maxxed out - all the voodoo, best graphics, masses of ram, vast hard discs and/or other solutions - thats not what i remember. these would be prohibitively expensive, and all the nocd, imaging, workarunds, hacks and other more recent patches and things weren't there either, maybe the interest in retro PCs has always had a slightly different shape from the way they were actually experienced

I'd add that its so easy not to have a retro pc and yet still experience almost all the games (and other applications) by use of patches, gog, steam, dosbox and so on that this itself might reduce interest too

Heh, in my experience things have exploded recently. Getting a sub-$100 retro PC is virtually impossible. Even loose P4 boards are listed for triple digits, and people seem to pay that from ended listings.

Hell, the 2013 X230i I'm typin from, barely worth cents 2-3 years ago, now goes for $70 in average condition.

I have 4 proper retro PC's and 2 of them i value at £1500 , one at £1000 and one for about £600.

There are some components that are so hard to find , the price just goes up and up and up....

Ahrle wrote on 2026-03-17, 02:57:

Even loose P4 boards are listed for triple digits, and people seem to pay that from ended listings.

I've got loads of Socket 775 boards I paid £1 for each. Fantastic investment. Any day now I'm going to be able to retire early! 😜

Big Pink wrote on 2026-07-23, 18:37:

Ahrle wrote on 2026-03-17, 02:57:

Even loose P4 boards are listed for triple digits, and people seem to pay that from ended listings.

I've got loads of Socket 775 boards I paid £1 for each. Fantastic investment. Any day now I'm going to be able to retire early! 😜

Anyone got ideas about which ones are fetching more than $50, got a few more than enough here, but mostly Intel made. Saw something new and shiny I want (Book 386) and wanna see if I can raise the price, plus the junk in/junk out consideration.

Joakim wrote on 2024-09-28, 16:43:

I am curious about your analysis, is the interest in retro PC hardware is decreasing? With retro PC hardware I am referring to something related to windows 98 and earlier.

I think with younger people there is less and less interest. They didnt grow up with it and dont care much for it because it wasnt attached to their time growing up like it was to me. Memories of paying on the family apple ii e and playing the kings quest games and so on , had a lot of memories behind it.

Younger generations dont care for it and I dont blame them.

I would love for people to be less interested in retro games and hardware because it became a fad to get into collecting retro games because of youtubers and so finding games and hardware go insanely hard because everyone was collecting because it was popular to.

In my opinion it depends on several variables.
- Demographics and age groups: Each have their own moments in life, where time and means for gaming and collecting goes from plenty to scarce and back.
- Available space and commuting hours: With cities getting crowded, and rent not getting any cheaper, having space for several pc towers, monitors and other hardware will be more dificult to access to. Reason for which portable emulators are selling more and more with prices for almost every budget.
- Less Available Income: With housing, healthcare and education trying to take even the last available penny out of our pockets, available income for none escencial items will get less available in the future, thus collector items will get harder to justify.
- Scalpers and asking prices: With concentration of money in fewer players everywhere in the world, scalpers look to sell their stuff to that top 20% and unless their business model is flawed, they can afford to wait more time. Many are using bots to search for any bargain they can resell before any individual buyer.
- There is still hope: From time to time a fair price for an interesting product appears in a local shop or on your favorite webmarketplace. A working Pentium 1 tower for less than 100, a big box sealed game for fast food price, even new sealed IDE hard drives for less than a movie ticket. At least that's my experience and opinion I wanted to share. Cheers! 😀

AntonPC wrote on Today, 08:00:

- There is still hope: From time to time a fair price for an interesting product appears in a local shop or on your favorite webmarketplace. A working Pentium 1 tower for less than 100, a big box sealed game for fast food price, even new sealed IDE hard drives for less than a movie ticket. At least that's my experience and opinion I wanted to share. Cheers! 😀

True. For old big box games, in my experience it's only like 5% of games that go for really high prices - usually something considered "iconic" or something related to a series that's still popular. The other 95% of stuff has little-to-no demand and is mostly forgotten.

I recently got at auction the binder version of Falcon 4.0 for $8. It's an incredible and unique release but, like most other simulation games from the 90s, has basically no demand or interest nowadays. I also picked up Earthsiege + the expansion (both big box) for $20 total, and the floppy version of X-Wing for $10 and TIE Fighter for $15. The last two in particular surprised me because I thought there would be more demand for the series, but they always sell for really cheap.

Then, consider getting something like Daggerfall, and prepare to spend $200-300.

So, collecting can be fun if you avoid those types of things and focus on the slightly more obscure stuff.

I wrote about this previously in this thread, but this same thing happens with hardware. It's the "iconic" or well-known stuff that goes up in value to ridiculous prices (like anything 3dfx), while the less desirable or lesser known stuff stays relatively cheap. It's like that in all markets that concern nostalgia-based collecting.