Appraisals, value, the "Market" was Re: And $500 gets you...

I think a bigger problem, and one that needs to be solved first, is determining the size and scope of our hobby. How can even experts like Sellam say "this hobby, as a whole, is so un/mis-informed..." when we're not sure what that "whole" is in the first place? How many collectors exist in the world? For the "active" colletors, it's not hard to figure out. There are 800-1,000 people in the classiccmp lists. My newsletter has several hundred unique readers who aren't on classiccmp. Erik Klein's vcforum has hundreds (thousands?) more. Older sites like old-computers.com may have thousands of followers. Sellam's VCF mailing list is huge too. These various resources are just a starting point, but I think it is a safe estimate to say there are maybe 5,000-10,000 "active" collectors in the world. (You have to consider ALL of the hobby web sites, museums, niches, etc. to understand why I'm arriving at this five-figure number -- there are a lot more than we initially think of.) But here's the neat part: for every active collector, how many other people just happen to own one or a few vintage computers, for sentimental reasons? How many of them don't see themselves as "collectors" per se, but just as ordinary nerds, for whom it just makes sense that really old computers are appealing? People who don't use the term "vintage" to describe the old Commodore they never got rid of, and who certainly don't know the term VCF...? And what about the vintage videogame hobby, calculator collectors, etc. -- do we count them? What is the ratio? For each active member of our hobby, maybe there are two or three people who are in the hobby and just don't know it yet. :) So maybe there there 15,000, 20,000 collectors globally. Once we have a real idea of the magic number, then we have to consider: are those of us here on classiccmp the meat of the hobby, or just the extremists? Are we the main curve, or the spike to be removed from the sample? -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Vintage Computer Festival Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2005 10:40 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Appraisals, value, the "Market" was Re: And $500 gets you... VCF wrote: The real problem in all this is that this hobby, as a whole, is so un/mis-informed when it comes to the values of old computers that you consistently get these wild price fluctuations.