State of the Hobby

Classic computer collecting is rewarding on so many levels. And in so many senses, we have a collector community relationship that rivals those of much more established hobbies. That's why it's so important, as the hobby begins to reach maturity, that we not lose sight of our fundamentals. Lately, there has been a disturbing trend towards isolationism and elitism among our flock, up to and including outright hostility. This has got to stop. Now, as Dennis Miller says, I don't want to get off on a rant here. As much as anyone else, I'd like a world full of retired aerospace engineers with garages full of free Altairs. I'd also like the IRS to abolish my income taxes and give me a free Ferrari. It's just not going to work that way, folks. Lashing out at people who want to publicize our hobby is like sitting in the nosebleed section of your hometown baseball stadium and hoping to god that your team loses big so you can afford better tickets next year. Get OVER it. Nobody understands our hobby, it's next to impossible to properly insure, there's far too little real museum space devoted to classic computers, hundreds of historic pieces are being tossed in the dumpster every day, and you want to keep the whole thing a big in-clique secret. Does this make any freaking sense to you? Every time I hear somebody say something like, "Are you going to sell that to a REAL collector at a decent price or are you going to WHORE it on EBAY?" I just want to gag. Amazing as this may seem, the people on eBay deserve this stuff as much as you do, mr. nose-in-the-air elitist. Oh sure, who wouldn't want to buy the thing at a token "collector price" and save a bunch of money, but don't make the seller feel like an ass because he wants to participate in a free-market economy. And quit calling the people on eBay "morons". OK, sure, the guy who bid $510 for the "signature Macintosh" was a few cans short of a six-pack, but if you bothered to follow up on the auction, you'd notice that most of the bidders pulled out once they caught a clue. And everybody who pays what YOU consider a high price for a genuinely interesting piece of hardware is not an idiot. People pay money for something because they want it. So, you're basically upset that somebody wants it more than you do? And while we're at it, what's with all this "some rich bastard overbid me" crap. If I went through all the classiccmp posts about rich executives, rich internet IPO participants, rich employees of big computer companies, and replaced all the occurrences of "rich" with "black" or "hispanic", the vintage computer festival would look like a Klan rally. America has always stood for a place where anybody can get rich if they work hard enough. Are you upset that somebody else got there first? There is a lot of assumption that, when someone pays a high price for a classic computer, that they A) don't know as much about it as you do, and B) don't care as much about it as you do, when the reverse is probably the case. Look, just because you refused that job opportunity at Apple in 1983 because you thought the Lisa was a bomb and your business selling print drivers for daisywheels was doing so well, DOESN'T mean you're an idealist. Because somebody outbid you doesn't mean they deserve it less than you do. Maybe they have more cash, maybe they were just willing to bid a higher perecentage of their income than you were. Heck, somebody with cash probably is going to care for the item better. A good percentage of the purported idealists complaining about high classic computer prices have an Altair on their kitchen table with coffee mug rings on the top. Look, I'm impressed that you're reading this post through a custom TCP/IP stack that you wrote for a Kaypro II. If you did that for the fun of it, more power to you. If you think that doing your daily correspondence on a dot matrix printer makes you a better classic computer collector than the rest of us, that's something else. It's like that guy who coated the entire exterior of his 1952 Oldsmobile with tiny rhinestones over a grueling 5-year period -- impressive, but the man obviously had too much time on his hands. It is NOT necessary to have a Wozniak beard, live in a geodesic dome house, and drive a Volkswagen Thing to appreciate classic computers. Wake up, open up, embrace the world's coming to know our hobby. Because otherwise, one day you're going to wake up and find that not a single schoolchildren remembers any of this history, because somebody started making 6800 assembler coding an entrance requirement to the museums. Kai