On Fri, 7 Oct 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote: I hear that there is "prior art" for transistors!

Been following this thread a bit a realized it's time to chime in. The Mustang analogy is a good one. This hobby is becoming like collecting cars. You really can't predict which stuff is going to be worth big money but the stuff that does always surprises the guys who owned one back in the day. Think about all the guys who basically threw away or sold for next to nothing their muscle cars in the 70's. How many split window corvettes survived the gas shortage. Today one of those cars needing restoration could go for more than the average home price in the US, make that more than two average homes. Parts can go for ridiculous amounts for someone who wants a complete set. I can remember searching for 6 months for a perfect tool set for my Porsche a few years back. If I would have found a NOS tool kit, I might have paid big money just to keep myself sane. As for stuff in vintage computer that is going up, it's not just Apple. It has to do with how mainstream and how rare something is. That Cromemco set went for good money, actually a little less than I would have guessed but more than it would have been only a few years ago. What do I mean by mainstream... we'll just because only two of an item exists, someone has to care. The dazzler was a big deal because of the display on the street in NYC which might have been the first time people saw computer generated video in person. So while the general population doesn't remember the name Cromemco (if they did it would have gone for more than 2k) the set itself is mainstream enough for people who know a little about 1970's computers who collect to want one and spend the money. The increasing price is because of unobtanium. Those joysticks are very rare. Sure this may bring more out of the closet, but unless they turn out to be C64 common, the price is set now. As for other stuff that is gaining in price, I do agree the rare Apple stuff is growing faster, but that's because it can pull from the business community as buyers who love the comeback story of Apple and what it represents. Here are some other non Apple examples... a Sol-20 could have been had for a few hundred bucks not too long ago. Now unless you want a rust bucket they are minimally 1k and a good working example can cost 2 to 3k. ALTAIR are another example. Grant Stocky's replica kit used to be more expensive than buying a real rev-0. Don't even get me started on ASR-33 or an ADM terminal. So does this mean you should hoard everything you have until the price goes up? I don't have a crystal ball to tell you what is the next item of value. Who knew that a movie about the Tucker automobile would make a Tucker one of the most desirable cars to a rare car collector. Before then they were just a failed car company along with many others so they stuff wasn't worth big money. Or the fact I could buy a vintage Maserati for 10k back in the 90's when it looked they they wouldn't survive which is now worth 200k or more since the company not only survived but became a "hip" car to own. Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to draw some tarot cards to set my eBay search list... Cheers, Corey corey cohen u??o? ???o?

I think you misunderstood my points. The hobby has already changed. Just like the car collecting, comic book collection and just about most other hobbies when they mature. The same type of people who complained about the price of an Xmen#1 because people would just buy and display them and not read them, complain when someone buys an ALTAIR to sit on their desk and doesn't turn it on. Better that than the garbage heap, without money coming into our hobby it would eventually die out and many artifacts would be lost to the dump. Cheers, Corey

I think we will just have to agree to disagree. Which is totally cool with me, each of us have a different opinion on this stuff. I have multiple collecting hobbies and they all resemble one another eventually. Cheers, Corey

On 10/08/2016 09:46 AM, js at cimmeri.com wrote: I have to confess to a certain amount of bemusement when I witness the phenomenon of game-obsession with early PCs. With the exception of "home" systems, such as Commodore and perhaps Apple and the like, I knew very few people who *purchased* a PC for game playing. Did people play games on PCs? Sure--but that was rarely the reason that anyone ponied up for a 1970s or 80s multiple-kilobuck system. Mind you, this was around the time that one could purchase a Porsche 914 for little more than $3000. Most of the people I knew purchased a PC to do business applications (AR, AP, GL, inventory, payroll or word processing) or worked with spreadsheets. Yet, very little of this is ever discussed on fora such as the Vintage Computer Federation site. Indeed, I think it's safe to speculate that the bulk of Intel Inboard cards were sold to those running Lotus 1-2-3. After we're all gone, what will future generations think of us? That we developed new hardware and software solely to play games? Wow. --Chuck

In a word: yes. I am being a bit tongue in cheek when I say that but not entirely. Initially this may not have been true - i.e. in the 80s people upgraded so CAD applications would run faster, or 1-2-3 worked faster but at a certain point (I say early Pentium era) computers got fast "enough" for 99% of the business applications out there. What continues to drive the needs for faster/newer systems has been bloatware (specially the OS which requires more and more and overhead) and games/entertainment (e.g. initially playing DVDs, then BD, then streaming, interactive web sites, Flash, etc..). I seriously doubt anyone needs a new graphics card and upgraded CPU every six to twelve months to make sure Excel is running "fast enough". The people who are going through voluntary frequent upgrade cycles are the gamers who need the fastest/latest machines to play the newest games. As I type this I am using a nine year old Thinkpad w/ a HDD (not SSD). The only thing I have done is upgraded to a full 8GB of RAM. I run Win 7, Office 2007, and IE for the most part in this machine and it is still as zippy as it was when I got it. So when you look back at the last twenty years of PC development new HW was essentially developed to continue generate profit for the manufacturers and this was justified by more and more demanding games/entertainment software. -Ali

On 10/08/2016 03:13 PM, Corey Cohen wrote: That's probably why I'm borderline loony in my old age--I never bothered to detox. Still don't. Playing a computer game is about as entertaining to me as putting my money into an online slot machine. --Chuck

On 10/08/2016 06:13 PM, TeoZ wrote: Certainly, but playing computer games after a hard day in front of the number-cruncher seems like a terrible way to detox. For some years, for me, it was bicycling and bridge. The SF Bay area used to be mostly semi-rural--a bicyclist's dream with light traffic. Cherries from Sunnyvale, Italian prunes from Santa Clara, wine from the hills around south San Jose. Then later music and charitable work. But computer games? No, there are better ways to spend your life. Remember when IBM did a product announcement for their PS/2 line? The demonstration software did not include, to the best of my knowledge, "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego", but rather employed a copy-protected hack of Lotus 1-2-3 (the PS/2 5.25" drive wasn't yet available). Serious stuff, not games. I do recall that there was a small start-up that occupied part of the lower floor of the "Prudential building' on Moffet Park Drive--we had the upper floor as overflow from the main SVLOPS building. I think they called themselves "Atari". A couple of us wandered into their offices during lunchtime and asked about job opportunities. We were rebuffed with a firm "no mainframe programmers wanted". I did do a port from a DECsystem 10 tape with the "Adventure" game on it to CDC SCOPE--it was all FORTRAN and data statements. But since I had the travel tables already, it ceased to be interesting after a few times through. So much for my interest in games. So color me a raving loon. :) --Chuck

On Sat, Oct 8, 2016 at 8:42 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Apologies for saying this, but it almost sounds like to me that you are validating their "no mainframe programmers wanted" stance. ;)

On 10/10/2016 1:03 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: A friend of mine was hired by them and moved up there. He did the following games for the 2600, BERZERK, Mario Bothers, SwordQuest (Earthworld), Gravitar, and Elevator Action. He went from Microdata to Atari. His background was in assembly and basic. While @ Microdata he wrote an 8080 emulator which would do a fair amount which ran in MPL on the 3200 systems we had, so that was something that surely helped him @ Atari. His main work @ Microdata was diagnostic writing, as far as the "day" job. I would say that Microdata with 2000+ employees was certainly a "mainframe" sized organization, and that didn't stop them from taking him on. Leaving his name off the post, you can google it, so that he doesn't have yet another spam catcher in the archives of this list. One thing you got on the 2600, was almost nothing to do your programming on. There was the rom with lots of code space, but there was I think either 256 or 512 bytes of ram total, and 1/2 of it was owned by the "system" such as it was. Fun environment to code for. The processor was 6502. If you are talking about the arcade operation here in this thread, that was separate from the programming staff for the consoles. Thanks jim

On 10/10/2016 1:29 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: He joined Atari in 78. He moved to a manager spot in 81. Thanks Jim

On Sat, Oct 08, 2016 at 04:20:55PM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote: [...] Find better games :) The theme of this list means that I should recommend some retro games and gaming systems, but those old games generally lacked depth and tried to cover it up by making the game insanely difficult and relying on extremely good timing and motor skills. I never really got on with retro games. There are still plenty of mindless first-person shooters with no depth coming out, but at least there are more gems to be found amongst the rough. I rather enjoyed the two Portal games, which superficially look like shooters -- your interface with its universe is called a Portal gun -- it's really a 3D puzzle game with some interesting plot twists. Goat Simulator is a bizarre sandbox in which there is the minimum of game elements required to hold all the satirical easter eggs together.

On 10/09/2016 01:58 AM, Peter Corlett wrote: Nope, not even. Has as much appeal as base jumping. I'd rather be working my shop banging on some sheet metal or playing tuba--or splitting firewood. We're all different--and some of us don't like to play games. --Chuck

On Sun, 9 Oct 2016, tony duell wrote: Douglas Adams was instrumental in a few games. But, somebody once asked him what he most liked to play with on his Mac. He said The Desktop.

On Oct 9, 2016 12:37 PM, "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: He said The Desktop. My favorite computer game is the C compiler. Granted, the scoring is rather subjective.

On 10/10/2016 1:38 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: At times I've been near playing "Whack-a-mole" on my machines with a real mallet. Beat them into submission. I like easy games, too, and in this modified game, there is only one mole. thanks jim

On Sun, Oct 9, 2016 at 4:00 PM, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote: Ooh! Me too! I owned an upright machine for about 10 years. Still my favorite arcade machine. I believe it was also one of the first machines to have dedicated hardware for computing 3D vector perspective too.

On Sat, Oct 8, 2016 at 9:07 AM, js at cimmeri.com <js at cimmeri.com> wrote: I was talking to a non-collector acquaintance just a few minutes ago who asked whether I was going to sell my TeleVideo TPC-I now that it works. For a moment I thought he'd lapsed into a foreign language.... -- Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu> Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical Narrative Through a Design Lens Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org> Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org> University of Washington There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."