New subject: Dell "Oldest PC" winner on

21 Aug 1999

In a message dated 8/21/99 9:51:14 PM US Eastern Standard Time, 
aknight(a)mindspring.com writes:

...
  In spite of the pros/cons about the lawyer who turned
  over his Altair for a WinPC, one good thing (I think)
  that came out of this contest is publicity/awareness regarding
  the preservation of classics.  Case in point is that
  when I got home last night and finally had a chance to
  read yesterday's local paper, in the business section there was 
  an article about the Dell contest and the museum, including a photo
  of one of the curator (David Weil) trying to bring up a Commodore PET.
  While I wasn't surprised to hear about the contest & museum
  on the 'net, I was quite surprised to read about it in a 
  local paper here in central North Carolina (right there next 
  to the news about Red Hat). It was an Associated Press article, 
  so it is bound to have appeared in other papers nationwide.  

  FWIW, the article says that the museum has 200 "pieces", including
  a 360 mainframe, "the KIM Homebrew computer, a kit which sold for
  $25 ..." (I wonder if they dropped a zero), and a "Royal
  Precision Vacuum Tube Computer" - described as being built in
  1963, with 113 vacuum tubes (sounds like a small number to me),
  drom memory, disk, & paper tape reader.  The article also said
  there was some kind of storage disk from 1965 that was the
  size of a tractor-trailer tire, holding 2.5 Mbytes, and had
  to be sandblasted to be erased.  (Huh???).

  Anyhow, this kind of awareness is a good thing, IMO.

well, awareness of old computers IS good, but like any hobby, once the 
speculators get involved, it's not a hobby anymore. eventually (and 
unfortunately) once the general populace mistakenly thinks that ANY old 
computer is worth hundreds or thousands of dollars it will be hard to find 
anything collectable cheaply. i'm trying to get a complete mac plus with the 
original boxes from my neighbor, but she's got that mindset and probably wont 
sell it for any realistic price although i try to downplay any investment 
value in computers. 

Dell "Oldest PC" winner on zdnet