Price guide for vintage computers

At 12:36 AM 10/26/01 -0400, Glen Goodwin wrote: I'd be very surprised if the "classic computer collector" market is large enough to support anyone publishing such a guide. What you describe would be a lot of work, even if you published on CD-R or web site instead of paper or enacted other capital-saving measures. To give a little praise where it's due, I'm sure Sellam could tell stories about the tremendous amount of work involved in putting on a convention like VCF. But consider there's still at least one annual Amiga-oriented show, and it appears to draw at least as many if not more attendees and paying exhibitors as a VCF. Talk about dead markets... My software company's Amiga versions hung on far longer than made any sense, yet the Amiga versions were discontinued at least six years ago, and they're still sending me flyers describing their conventions. And although eBay appears to be doing nothing with all that pricing information of all their past auctions, you never know. Maybe they have a splinter company under another name that's already selling the data. Maybe they're saving it all onto endless piles of DLTs and they'll massage it someday. Or maybe it's all falling into the bit bucket - who knows. If they're saving it, I wonder if they were smart enough to cache the externally hosted images. On the other hand, I bet that if you published a price guide in any market and directly noted that you derived your price info from eBay auctions, they'd smack you with legal paper urging you to cease and desist from mining their property without permission. - John