10 Nov
2005
10 Nov
'05
5:27 p.m.
Yikes. Topic drift.
Some things are valuable because they are rare. And some collectors
revere things mostly if they are rare. Then, some people just want one
of each design of some category of thing and a few examples just
_happen_ to be rare.
In my humble opinion, a hobby category becomes fairly tedious and
boring when it becomes a matter of 'rarity for the sake of rarity' for a
I tend to use the term 'Stamp Collector' for such computer collectors.
They are the sort of people who rarely look beyond the outside case --
they'll spend time and money to track down some varient with an odd
external feature, even though it's the same inside. Or they'll ignore
varients where there are significant (and interesting) internal changes.
The other thing about such people is that they tend to not bother about
anything but the procrssor (keyboard/processor for home computers, of
course). They don't grab the peripherals (particularly not 3rd party
peripherals) or software. Great pity. Those bits are often more interesting.
I am not a collector, at least not in the normal sense. Yes, I have some
pretty rare stuff. And some very common stuff. But in gneeral if I've
actively looked for someting, it's becuase I am interested in some desing
feautre of it (of course if somebody's throwing something out, I have
this habit of rescuing it, which is how I ended up with things like a C64...)
-tony