8 Jun
2006
8 Jun
'06
4:50 p.m.
I've received the following from Dave McGuire, who is a fellow DEC
collector (some of you know him):
Hey folks. I just had a disturbing conversation
with an eBay seller
up in Canada. One of his auctions was for DRAM chips "for gold scrap"
that he claimed to have "removed from some old DEC computer". I sent
him a question asking him what happened to the rest of it, and
reminding him that "some old DEC computer" was likely worth orders of
magnitude more than the trivial amount of gold that one might glean
from recycling DRAM chips.
He replied with this:
--
Eric Dittman
dittman at dittman.net
Not anymore. In case you haven't noticed,
the market for DEC PDP
stuff is gone. All of the collectors have as much as they want and
nobody is actually using Qbus anymore. The same happened about a year
ago with IBM MCA stuff. You can't even get $10 a card anymore. I've
shipped out hundreds of pounds of DEC Qbus and IBM MCA for scrap
metals. You should do the same.
This is, of course, COMPLETELY incorrect, aside from being
disturbing. The DEC collector market is booming like never before,
and growing like crazy.