This just makes me really SICK

----- Original Message ----- From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf(a)siconic.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2004 4:38 PM Subject: Re: This just makes me really SICK Festival ---- http://www.vintage.org mputers ] http://marketplace.vintage.org ] Any long term hobby I have ever seen depends on hobbyists and dealers they feed on each other. If a guy can make a few bucks on the side saving and storing computers he will do it, this allows the collector to be able to find people with equipment to keep his hobby going. If there wasn't a market for corvette parts I wouldn't be able to keep mine running. I don't mind people making a few bucks from any hobby I ever got into because without them there is absolutely no motivation for people "not into" the hobby to keep from throwing things out. Any hobby goes through a phase where prices go from low to crazy levels followed by the cashout and implosion of pricing. But what you are left with is a stable group of collectors, reasonable prices, large amounts of collectable material that was dug out during the boom, lots of documentation, a set of grading outlines used by everyone, and documented dealers who stock the stuff your looking for and you know where to find them. Having a catalog published makes life allot easier for people just starting out in their hobby. You mentioned $500 c64's (assuming you meant on ebay) and how people toss them away when they cant get that much out of them. I purchased a c64, c128 on ebay for my collection and paid maybe 30-50 for each with quite a bit of other hardware and accessories. You can look on ebay every day and find reasonable (meaning somebody taking the time to dig an item out, clean it, test it as working or not, take a picture, and pay ebay its cut) prices on these items unlike the Vintage Computer Marketplace the only 1541 disk drive is listed for $50. Supply and demand from collectors looking at their checkbooks on a specific day decide what is overpriced and what is a deal, experts can only use their knowledge of the subject to give reasonable guesses at the time of publication what something is worth and which models are worth more then others. If items sell for more then you think they are worth then you just don't want it as bad as somebody else does. I have dumped a few dollars into my collection (haven't added it up don't want to either) and have no plan on selling any of it at this time (and I don't regret the expense either).