Common items you passed up that turned rare when you wanted them

Obviously. I would put most clone PCs (particularly 386+) in this category. Me too. Well, it's useful to me. An example would be my TRS-80 Model 4. I still use it, it's got a reasonable disk controller (WD1793 based) and I have some good disk hacking utilities. I fired it up the other day to back up a BBC micro disk (it was easier to do that than set up a Beeb, and I wanted to make a backup before I did anything eise). But I hardly think Model 4 is going to make me rich.... I'm remarkably bad at getting stuff that has collector value :-). Many of my machines are technically interesting (which is why I grabbed them), some are even historically interesting, but for some reason collectors don't go crazy for PERQs, HP9830s, and the like. And almost none of my stuff is 'collector grade' I don't have original boxes, etc. And it looks used. For example I have a fair number of old HP handhelds, but they all have minor dings, etc on them. This doesn't bother me -- I still _use_ them. But the value to a collector, even of things like my 16C, 9100B, etc is probably minimal. The least valuable HP I own is one that I would never give up. An old, battered, HP45. The reason is that I built it. I was given a load of junk at an HPCC meeting mad there were enough bits to make a 45. The chips on the logic board came from 2 or 3 machines, the displays aren't all the same sixe (These machines have 3 5-digit display modules in them, HP used 2 different character height ones, you're supposed to have all 3 the same in a particular machine, obviously), and so on. To a collector it's worthless. To me, because I got it going, and because doing that taught me a lot about how the classic series HPs work, it's priceless. -tony