12 Oct
2000
12 Oct
'00
4:10 p.m.
At 06:39 PM 10/12/00 -0500, John wrote:
Personally, I'm in a throw-away mood as opposed to
a
collection mood. I tossed 3" x 3" x 25" of old clone
8088 through 486 PCs and cases away last Tuesday.
Besides the obvious typo (unless you actually put the cases in the trash
compactor first :-) I would say that you are metamorphosing.
I recently gave away all my Amiga stuff. And it wasn't because it wasn't
good stuff. In fact it was the best stuff of everything, but it just wasn't
germane to my collection.
I think its very similar to butterflies. You start as a collecting
caterpillar and you take everything anyone offers you or you find. You can
spend years doing this and you wrap yourself up in a collection much like a
chrysalis. Finally, after being stuck in there for a while you "break out"
and toss out a whole bunch of stuff and go deep on a particular thing (or
things). And that becomes a very beautiful and "light" collection. Then
depending on your mentality you either drink only nectar or you fall from
grace and become a caterpillar again :-)
My mind kept running the mantra "They will never
be uncommon
or rare or all that interesting." I saved some IBM brand
PCs of each generation, a hardcard, and a few others.
I haven't even made my way to the pile of monitors yet.
They will of course be rare at some point. But its probably not worth
paying the freight to store them. My Dad started collecting Cap guns (you
know, made a bazillion and sold for a nickel in the 30's and 40's but now
they are "rare and collectible.") My kids may in fact feel about a Compag
DeskPro 286 like I do about a PDP-8. We'll see. Recently my computer
collection has been appreciating more rapidly than my stock portfolio!
I coalesced a box of Pentium 50-166 Mhz era
motherboards,
some brand-new, and for heaven's sake, they would barely
fetch a few bucks on eBay. My other mantra was a friend's
rule that if you can't sell it on eBay, throw it out.
http://www.freeboxen.com/ looks interesting, but this
stuff is hardly worth the cost of shipping.
Actually they are also fun to use to learn about things like the PCI bus
where you aren't afraid to try something that might zorch the motherboard.
--Chuck