I lived in the halcyon days of this hobby - at the expense of people thinking I was nuts - I started in 2001, back then, there was no Vogons (to my knowledge), and even the vintage computer forums would laugh me out the door for souping up 486's and 386's.
My post will be not much complaining - and more of a retrospective, with some nostalgia.....
But god man - the thrift shops?
Ever been paid $5 to take 3 IBM EduQuest 486's home from the Salvation Army Thrift?
I remember walking into little downtown Opelika shops and walking out with stacks of x86 PC's for the cost of a Papa John's large Pepperoni Pizza!
Coming home from high school with a backpack full of expansion cards, hard disks, mice, game controllers.
One reason I was able to prolong my Compaq collecting for awhile? New-Old-Stock still good 80's Tadiran Lithium cell batteries for Compaq Deskpro 286/386! Southern Electronics was really an undervalued resource for me at the time.
I swear in retrospect, it felt like it was raining "Decript old PC's" everywhere! My shed was a sea of beige faceplates and dark grey drives! Packard Bells stretching the length of my workbench.
Then the mid 2000's came along, and I started to see prices on XT's go up - so spending $45 on a PC was not that bad of a deal. But it was not as ideal as I was nabbing 486's for like....$3-10 at the local thrift shops. So I started focusing on XTs and ATs for awhile.
Then the late 2000's came around, I'd moved to Seattle. Is it just me or does it seem this hobby is more popular in the deep south? All those years in East Alabama, people would randomly pop up on VCF and Uncreative Labs and most of them were from Alabama/Florida/Georgia/Virginia/Kentucky/Tennesee.......
When I first moved to Seattle - man - we had the Boeing surplus store, which I missed out on. RE-PC carrying piles upon piles of ISA cards (though they're doing that again now, and Motherboards, at least in Tukwila they are), I picked up 2 9-pin monitors in the span of 3 months, dug up a 386 AT Clone at a pawn shop, bought 486's by little local companies like Holt Office Systems and Cat Computers......
Then the 2010's started up and suddenly I'm on I.T. projects mentioning I mess with this old stuff, and suddenly it's not like "BWAHAHAHAHA! What are you doing with that old Boat Anchor? How many doors in your house do you need to prop open, My cellphone is faster...yadda yadda" - now it's like "DUDE!!! You have a Tandy 1000? I wish I had one of those. Do you have Space Quest."
And at the same time I saw the vintage AT desktops I like to mess with dissappear. That Gateway 2000 was the last one I saw, and it was $40 originally, they marked it down to $10. Most places here now scrap CRT monitors, anything computer and beige, I witnessed a very nice 1970's hobbyist computer or terminal at Goodwill shrinkwrapped to die about 4 months ago.
Meanwhile, E-bay drove the prices up on this stuff, because that's how everyone prices it out now. First came the hoarders that would get all the same crap I was selling for $15-40 on E-bay, and charging like what....$315, $150, $560? That started even in the late 2000's, we all throught these guys were nuts, and some of them were, they kept these machines on there for years, never being bought, and getting made fun of on the various forums I hung out on at the time.
But now, those guys are seen as a bluebook for these things.
And it messes up the mainstream perception of the activity too. For example, I have news tickers on my browsers, and every few months I get some damn article telling me those vintage videogames/computers are worth a huge chunk of money - and their figures are in the bloody clouds. Yeah, I'm going to get $1500 for my Atari 2600? That's where a lot of the insane pricing comes from is the mainstream media. What I find hilarious is later on they'll post another article telling you "15 things to dump from your life" and whats on it "your old computer!" so basically, you're telling me to scrap that $50,000 PC? HAH.
I always thought an offical bluebook - like auto collectors, guitar collectors, gun nuts, and so on have to provide an official guideline would be useful.
Sometimes I think I really should make a thread with all my builds and weirdness and stories though, so much details I could dive into that would turn this post into a page.