20 Oct
2018
20 Oct
'18
8:57 a.m.
From: Doc Shipley
You guys want people to stop scavenging those
irreplaceable treasures?
Ante up, pure and simple.
That works for keeping stuff out of the hands of scrappers (who are, after
all, business-people) - but not for fetishists who will pay totally
mind-blowing sums for them.
Sorry, I'm not paying $5K for _any_ keyboard. You can buy (for example) a
complete PDP-11/70 for that much money.
In the end, that system is worth twice as much as
desoldered parts as
the best offer I got.
But will _all_ of the constituent parts sell, or just some of them - the rest
being destined to sit on a shelf, un-sold, until they are pitched?
There's a similar debate in other areas of collection - e.g. antique Japanese
woodblock-printed books. One can usually make more money by taking them
apart, and selling them a page at a time, as opposed to selling them as
complete books. (At least all the pages do tend to sell.) Some people
consider this vandalism - destroying a 200-year old artifact to maximize $$.
I can't say they're wrong...
Noel