First post, by Tetrium
- Rank
- l33t++
Before I continue, I want to be very clear to anyone reading this that any kind of trading is prohibited on Vogons and that I haven't the slightest intent to bend the rules in any way. Afaic these rules have proven to be very effective and I fully support them staying that way.
Now that I have said this, for the last couple of years I've noticed that even though I still like to talk about old hardware and everything around it, that my passion for actually using the stuff I have has been consistently low. And that is making me doubt about how to proceed next.
I was lucky that I entered the retrocomputing hobby at an early age, so to speak. I was right there when complete 486 systems were dumped onto the streets and literally nobody cared about them. This was over 10 years ago though. How times have changed...
The motivation to actually start this thread is because these days I (we) see people wanting to start this hobby constantly, they keep dripping in all the time including here on Vogons. But these people are having a real hard time finding stuff for outrageous prices and lots of this stuff is simply broken. In short, this hobby is not as cheap as it used to be (I think we all can agree on that).
I've been considering this for the last few years now, but what put me off from actually offering parts for donation is greed. The greed of commercial sellers biting into what they see as an opportunity to load up on parts because of money, thereby leaving the hobbyists with nothing except more advertisements on sites like Ebay. This would be extremely likely to happen if I were to give stuff away.
The other option would be to simply start selling stuff. But frankly, I just can't be bothered with walking to the post office with bags full of packages every week, testing all parts to check if they are still correct, acquiring enough packaging materials and then having to deal with people claiming their package has never arrived. And to top this off, the vast majority of the stuff I can spare is barely worth the effort to commercially sell.
But the most important reason is that this will take so much time and energy! I'd have to make it a way of life and I'm just not wanting to go down that route.
And last but not least, it just doesn't feel right to sell stuff to potential other Vogons members that I got from another Vogons member for the price of only shipping.
The problem is that if I decide to do nothing (which is what I have been doing the last few years), then stuff which may still be sought after but is useless to me, will just keep rotting away in my attic and none of it will ever be used.
Couple examples:
I have so many AT towers, I'd never be able to use all of them, but most I'd never want to part with because I think they look awesome. But there are others who find it impossible to acquire AT cases for a reasonably price and reasonable shipping costs and here I am sitting on a ton of these (or actually 25 of them, one is missing it's panel but I understood some people here can recreate new ones which is something I will never do) and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't mind donating a couple of the cases I don't even like to someone who'd be delighted to have them.
Years ago I was gifted a working 486 motherboard by another Vogons member for which I only paid shipping I think, the only problem was that it needed a new DIN connector for a keyboard soldered onto the board, but I don't even have any soldering skills 🤣. So I wouldn't mind parting with it, which brings me back to square one.
And now that I mention soldering, everyone knows these caps will go bust, even if they haven't done so already. I can't even repair them, nor would I want to because I have so much stuff laying around that if I needed a Tualatin board for my newest 1400S build, I have 10 other boards just waiting for me to try them out. So why would I even bother acquiring caps for money I don't even have, I'll simply try one of my other 10 Tualatin boards till I find one that will work.
Now of course I'm not a fool so my Cyrix 133 and ES's are staying! 😁
But some of the stuff that only requires small fixes, I can part with.
So now what do I do? 🤣!
