State of the Hobby - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

1 Jul 1999

This argument is getting to where it's pretty silly.

I don't see how anyone can complain about buying used computer hardware for
considerably less than it cost when new.

The mythical "free Altair" which pops up again and again is generally sold,
even in "better than new" (properly assembled and functional) condition for
significantly less than what it cost new, in "real" dollars.  -- YES -- even
on eBay!

The typical PDP8 owned by persons in this particular interest group were
certainly not purchased for what they cost new, even in inflated dollars, so
I really can't see what the complaint is.  Sure, some people are able, and,
some, misguided though they may seem to be, even willing to pay more than I
think they should for a given item.  To them, I sell what I can.

In a recent auction on eBay, a MITS Floppy Disk Drive was auctioned off at
$565.  "WOW!" you may say, but that unit cost $1300 when new, and that was
in dollars that were a DOLLAR, and not just the price of a candy bar.  I'm
presently in the process of selling off excess 8" floppy drives for $5 each,
functionally tested and aligned, plus the estimated cost of packaging and
shipping, since I don't want more work on top of the alignment and testing,
estimated by Mailboxes, etc, which is where I'll have them boxed and
shipped.  I've offered these same drives to people, as is, for just the cost
of shipping, and most wouldn't pay even for the shipping.

When I bought my first pair of 8" floppy drives they cost $675 each.  The
last pair I bought cost $470 each in 1981.  In 1980, it seems to me, a
typical S-100 CPU cost $250.  A floppy controller cost about the same, and a
terminal cost $750.

If people wanted more than that for these devices, even though they were in
perfectly functional and cosmetically perfect condition, I could understand
the complaints.  I won't be convinced that the prices being paid at auction,
publicity or not, for "old, used, obsolete" computers or component are
unreasonable until someone shows me a similarly pristine '55 Thunderbird
that's going unsold because its price is over half what it cost new.

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffrey l Kaneko &lt;jeff.kaneko(a)juno.com&gt;
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
&lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt;
Date: Thursday, July 01, 1999 10:36 AM
Subject: Re: State of the Hobby

...
 This will draw alot of flames, and may upset certain
people.
Please send personal attacks to me directly.

On Wed, 30 Jun 1999 10:20:38 -0700 Kai Kaltenbach &lt;kaikal(a)MICROSOFT.com&gt;
writes:
  Classic computer collecting is rewarding on so
many levels.  And in
 so many senses, we have a collector community relationship that rivals those
  of much more established hobbies.  That's why
it's so important, as the 
  hobby begins to reach maturity, that we not lose
sight of our fundamentals.

But you've missed the one 'fundamental' that uniquely gives our hobby
its true appeal: Our hobby exists (existed) purely for its own sake.
No strings, wire, or unneeded baggage.  It existed purely for the joy
of computing at its most base level, and the aquisition of knowledge
of the science.

  Lately, there has been a disturbing trend towards
isolationism and
 elitism among our flock, up to and including outright hostility.  This has
  got to stop. 
Hostile? Yer damned right.  We're on the defensive now.  The
'marketplace'
is poised to fundamentally change what I perceive as the original charter
of the computing hobby.

  Now, as Dennis Miller says, I don't want to
get off on a rant here.
 As much as anyone else, I'd like a world full of retired aerospace
 engineers with garages full of free Altairs.  I'd also like the IRS
 to abolish my income taxes and give me a free Ferrari.  It's just not
 going to work that way, folks. 
You hit a raw nerve here, buddy boy.  I don't *want* garages of free
Altairs (or whatever).  All I want is to be able to purchase the material

that is of interest to me at a *reasonable* price.  Now the retired
Aerospace
Engineer thinks he can make a fortune off his old computers. Piss.

  Lashing out at people who want to publicize our
hobby is like
 sitting in the nosebleed section of your hometown baseball stadium
 and hoping to god that your team loses big so you can afford better
 tickets next year. 
This to me, clearly says you have no clue as to what is at stake here.
 From my perspective, it's more like lashing
out at land speculators who want to parcel out what was once tribal land, the
parcels by the
lake commanding the highest prices.  What was once an almost free and
accessable resource, now belongs only to the elite who can pay the price.

  Get OVER it.  Nobody understands our hobby,
it's next to impossible to
 properly insure, 
Insure.  Huh, yeah right.  Why would you want to insure something unless
you spent BIG BUCK$ on it?

  there's far too little real museum space
devoted to
 classic computers, 
Whaddaya mean by 'real museum space'?!?  You mean like in the Deutsche
Museum? The LA Museum of Sci & Ind.?  The Guggenheim?!?!  Tell ya what.
When these 'heavies' get real serious about computing engines built
during *my* lifetime, I'm outta here.  No way I'll be able to afford it
then.

  hundreds of historic pieces are being tossed in
the
 dumpster every day, 
As tragic as this situation is, ss long as the possibility for this
exists, there will be hope for the hobbyist with little or no money
(this includes *most* of our young people).

  and you want to keep the whole thing a big
in-clique secret.
 Does this make any freaking sense to you? 
Yes.  This hobby is what it is because it was populated almost
exclusively
by what I will refer to as 'true believers':  Guys with little (or no)
money but alot of patience and a solid *commitment* to make the machines
live.

Now there are amongst us speculators who don't truly believe;
they don't practice the true faith, and don't care to.  All they
know is that computers have become a 'hot' collectible, and they want
a piece of the action.  It is these that we must oppose.

  Every time I hear somebody say something like,
"Are you going to
 sell that to a REAL collector at a decent price or are you going to
 WHORE it on EBAY?" I just want to gag. 
I see the prices, and *I* just want to gag.  The continued exposure
of our hobby on forums like E-BAy will only cause prices to rise.  Very
soon, many of us will be priced out . . .

  Amazing as this may seem, the people on eBay
deserve this stuff as
 much as you do, mr. nose-in-the-air elitist. 
Maybe they do.  But they have the money; many of us 'tribesmen' don't.
It seems you've mis-applied the 'eliteist' label, in this case.

  Oh sure, who wouldn't want to buy the thing
at a token "collector price"
  and save a bunch of money, but don't make the
seller feel like an ass
 because he wants to participate in a free-market economy. 
We can't stop folks from auctioning off stuff on e-bay; that's their
right.  ALl I know is, is that prices are going up, and e-bay isn't
helping the matter.  As far as I'm concerned, E-Bay is hurting our
hobbyist 'way of life', not enhancing it.

  And quit calling the people on eBay
"morons".  OK, sure, the guy who
 bid $510 for the "signature Macintosh" was a few cans short of a
 six-pack, but if you bothered to follow up on the auction, you'd notice 
  that most of the bidders pulled out once they
caught a clue.  And 
I try to ignore some of the stupidity on this planet.  Fortunately,
there are still (for the moment) plenty of cheap MAC's to go around.

  everybody who pays what YOU consider a high price
for a genuinely
 interesting piece of hardware is not an idiot.  People pay money for
 something because they want it.  So, you're basically upset that
 somebody wants it more than you do? 
SO you're convinced that someone with a pile of money to throw at
a 'hobby' simply wants it more than someone who's broke??!!  Sheesh.
It must be nice to rich, so you feel justified in making implications
like that.

IN the hobby I knew, money was only a very small part of the equation.
Used to be, all I needed was a few dollars, some basic tools, and a
little luck.  Now I need *deep* pockets, too.  I'm upset that the
'elite' is putting my favorite passtime out of my reach.

  And while we're at it, what's with all
this "some rich bastard
 overbid me" crap.  If I went through all the classiccmp posts about rich
  executives, rich internet IPO participants, rich
employees of big computer
  companies, and replaced all the occurrences of
"rich" with "black" or
 "hispanic", the vintage computer festival would look like a Klan rally. 

What can I say? This used to be a 'poor mans' hobby.  I'm seeing one
segment being displaced and disenfranchised by another.  Yep.

     "I'm the *angriest* computer nerd in America!"

  America has always stood for a place where
anybody can get rich if they 
  work hard enough.  Are you upset that somebody
else got there first? 
No, I'm upset that there is the pretense of a level playing field.
It *was* nearly level at one time.  It isn't anymore.

  There is a lot of assumption that, when someone
pays a high price for
 a classic computer, that they A) don't know as much about it as you
 do, and B) don't care as much about it as you do, when the reverse is
 probably the case.  Look, just because you refused that job opportunity 
  at Apple in 1983 because you thought the Lisa was
a bomb and your
 business selling print drivers for daisywheels was doing so well,
 DOESN'T mean you're an idealist. 
All it means is that you were a little short-sighted.

  Because somebody outbid you doesn't mean they
deserve it less than
 you do. Maybe they have more cash, maybe they were just willing to bid a
  higher perecentage of their income than you were.
 Heck, somebody with cash
  probably is going to care for the item better.  A
good percentage of
 the purported idealists complaining about high classic computer prices
 have an Altair on their kitchen table with coffee mug rings on the top. 

Gosh darnit, you got us there. Us pore folk generally don't have the
the fancy display and storage facilities as do our more well-heeled
bretheren.  But then again, for us, these are objects of affection; we
like to keep them close to us (the kitchen or livingroom seems
appropriate).

  Look, I'm impressed that you're reading
this post through a custom TCP/IP
  stack that you wrote for a Kaypro II.  If you did
that for the fun of it, more
  power to you.  If you think that doing your daily
correspondence on a dot
  matrix printer makes you a better classic
computer collector than the rest
  of us, that's something else. 
It doesn't make us better, just more joyful.

  It's like that guy who coated the entire
exterior of his 1952 Oldsmobile
  with tiny rhinestones over a grueling 5-year
period -- impressive, but
 the man obviously had too much time on his hands. 
But if it's something special to *him* isn't that part of what this hobby

was (is) all about?

  It is NOT necessary to have a Wozniak beard, live
in a geodesic dome
 house, and drive a Volkswagen Thing to appreciate classic computers. 
Maybe not, but the way it's going, you'll have to be able to afford
the aforementioned house, and a *mint* example of the aforementioned
car before you can even *consider* having a classic computer for your
yourself.

  Wake up, open up, embrace the world's coming
to know our hobby. 
True believers only. Sorry.  Greed and commercialism are threatening to
corrupt our 'society'.  Maybe there's nothing we can do about it,
but we won't go quietly. . .

  Because otherwise, one day you're going to
wake up and find that not a
 single schoolchildren remembers any of this history, because somebody
 started making 6800 assembler coding an entrance requirement to the museums.

True believers will always welcome initiates.  But only the truly
committed will mature and contribute.  These are the ones who will
make our hobby live.  If you shut these out by raising the price
of admission, then our hobby (as we now know it) will certainly die.

Jeff

___________________________________________________________________
Get the Internet just the way you want it.
Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month!
Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj. 