16 Jul
2005
16 Jul
'05
8:09 p.m.
Teo Zenios wrote:
I agree with what was said above completely.
The only thing that will harm the hobby long term is if people pay very
little or nothing for classic machines so there is no reason for the owners
to sell them instead of scrapping them. Most people who blow allot of cash
on any hobby and get bored will sell the collectable back to other hobbyists
eventually. Overpaying on a public auction site just gets more people
digging through their collection to turn up more of the same for sale.
A waste to me would be a private collector having multiple copies of a
desirable and somewhat rare machine/part/manual/etc and sitting on it for a
few decades.
Exactly!!! If it is worth the effort of placing on ebay, VCM or any
other venue, then that is doing the hobby a service regardless of
ultimate price. If percieved value of an item falls below the cost of
placing it up for sale, it becomes not worth the effort and will result
in more equipment sent to the land fill or to the scrapper.
As for the hoarding issue, sometimes I collect several examples of one
machine. Sometimes it's for spare parts, for display of a different
version of the OS, for development or for future trade/sale to finance
my own collection. The ones I do have multiple examples are mostly
older Macs and Mac clones that have no "real" current value but I
couldn't stand to see a perfectly good box being dumpstered, or NeXT
slabs - not exactly rare but they will get that way eventually and so
will be good trade goods or resale items in the near future. As for
manuals, I think they should be scanned into pdf's for furture
availability as downloads.
James
--
www.blackcube.org The Texas State Home for Wayward and Orphaned Computers