Chuck Guzis wrote: Certainly was! Mind you, they worked and I could *almost* have afforded one back then, so in some ways CHEAP was useful. I have no idea about fair, and you are on the wrong side of the pond for it to be worth my while trying to con you out of it (although, if you're willing to pick up the shipping, do let me know :-)), but the last couple I saw on ebay went for about ?200 or so. Back in the dot-com boom I saw one go for ?400. Antonio -- Antonio carlini arcarlini at iee.org

Chuck Guzis wrote: Of course it's possible that makes it more valuable to a UK Sinclair collector because it's even rarer. Collectors often work in mysterious ways... But yes, prices are silly - I mean 200 to 400 pounds for something the size of a piece of toast seems a little crazy :-) Actually, there can't be many NTSC versions on the USA side of the pond. Presumably the machines didn't sell nearly as well in the US as they did in the UK. But whether they're collectable to US people is another matter... cheers Jules

Jules Richardson wrote: You want to talk about silly, look at the price of Roland TB-303s on eBay. I saw a broken one sell for ?400 the other day. And to think, back when I was in school, before the early days of acid house, I passed one up, boxed, used once, for ?25. Because I just wasn't into synthesizers then. Bah. Gordon

On 10/11/05 17:53, "a.carlini at ntlworld.com" <arcarlini at iee.org> wrote: Typical epay prices for ZX80s range from about ukp75 for a fairly battered example (dirty, stained case, broken corners etc) through ~ukp120 for a clean one with manual and PSU to about ukp200 for a good condition boxed one. There's occasionally a bidding war when a pristine white one appears in its shipping box - remember there was no retail box - and the price can still hit well over ukp300. Mine was ukp10 but it didn't have its manual :oD A

Chuck Guzis wrote: My gut feeling was about 50 pounds, which presumably works out around 80 USD (ish ;) *Possibly* a few bucks less due to lack of PSU, but personally I don't really consider unregulated wall-wart PSUs to contribute much to the value of a machine. As it's incomplete anyway (no box) it probably doesn't matter. Having said all that, I don't personally consider EBay a useful resource of fair prices for things. If that's taken into account, you could probably raise the asking price a fair bit! cheers J.

Exactly. And don't care if it works properly, or if it's convenient to use. Remember Sinclair once sold a scientific calculator that gave you 3 accureate significant figures if you were lucky! I really don't understand the love of Sinclair products. IU'd much rather have nad use something DEC or HP, or one of the many other companies that didn't cut every possible corner and then some impossible ones. But then collectores are often strange. -tony

I prefer to get all the computers I dreampt of using back then, but no way could I afford (PDP11s, HPs, etc). Not the machines I tried to use and had no end of problems with. -tony

On 11/10/2005 at 8:13 PM ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk wrote: I wonder if there's a collector's market for Muntz TVs? I suspect that you probably had a version of "Madman Muntz" on your side of the pond. In a nutshell, Muntz sold sets that were stripped to their very minimum parts count. His tuners didn't have AFC, but neither did they have a manual tuning adjustment--they were set at the factory. If you had a problem, you called one of his service people to tweak the tuning. Cheers, Chuck

Probalby the nearest equivalent is Alan Sugar (Amstrad). Their products are also cheaply made (but tend to work better than Sinclair!), and I am sure some people collect them. Amstrad, of course, sold PC near-compatibles where the PSU was in the monitor (one SMPSU for the monitor and computer), where the real-time clock battery was a set of 4AA cells that fitted into the top of the system unit (with no cover -- the cover was the monitor base), a laptop which was wider than a PDP11 (seriously, it's got a full-size 102 key keyboard. and other similarly 'interesting' products. Still, for some reason I acturally prefer them to Sinclair's offerings. It may well be because my first computer as a Sinclair (MK14), and I had so many problems with it (both from the manual and the ridiculous design) that I never want to suffer one of his products again. -tony

Not quite. The chips, including the Amstrad gate arrays are pretty much the same, but the mechanical layout is different. The PPC has 2 boards stacked one on top of the other, with a strange DIN41612-like connector (but longer, I think 40 pins in a row) between them. AFAIK both models could take 2 drives and the internal modem option card. I have a PPC640, 2 drives, modem, etc, And the service manual + programming reference. IIRC it's 10 C cells, and they don't last that long. I normally run mine off a 12V bench supply. Well, it's probably related to the NatSemi design in that it's a simple SC/MP system. But I can't beleive NatSemi used '157s as latches (surely that should have been '175), for example. The rumour I heard was that it was based on a final year undergraduate project at Cambridge University (which in turn was probably influenced by the NatSemi reference design).. MK14 would have been the correct format for a userid at Cambridge at that time I think. -tony

Tony Duell wrote: I suppose the name Sinclair is closely tied to the early days of the home computer boom, and at least in the UK people will think of his products before the likes of Commodore or Apple. Plus as Sridhar said, one of his machines was often the first that many of us owned (it was in my case, which was why I hung onto my Sinclair collection for a long time after I really needed the space it took up :) Plus Sinclair always had that whacky mad scientist air about him which makes his stuff appealing. I suppose the thing about Sinclair stuff is that it was cheap - but it was obviously cheap, so you knew pretty much what you were getting. Compare to machines with similar capabilities of the time and quite often they weren't really much better in terms of what users wanted - but the packaging was a lot slicker and hence the price was a lot higher... cheers Jules

On Thu, 10 Nov 2005 15:52:30 -0800 "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Must have been a long, loooong time ago. The US Treasury stopped making Indian-head cents in 1909. Or did you mean the 'change in design' that happened in 1959 when the reverse was changed? Or the design change in 1983 when the coins stopped being made of bronze (with an actual bullion value near the worth of one cent) to bronze-plated zinc (uh, US Mint: places like Germany near the end of WWII were minting their coins out of zinc. Take a hint.) Yikes. Topic drift. Some things are valuable because they are rare. And some collectors revere things mostly if they are rare. Then, some people just want one of each design of some category of thing and a few examples just _happen_ to be rare. In my humble opinion, a hobby category becomes fairly tedious and boring when it becomes a matter of 'rarity for the sake of rarity' for a significant part of the hobby's community. Collection-based hobbies where the publisher/producer of an item specifically limits the number just to _produce_ rareties (i.e. anything at all that has 'Collector's Edition' printed prominently on the original packaging) are the worst. But other people float their boats the way they like, I guess. I make some spending money myself from time to time manipulating the 'scarcity' phenomenon on eBay so I shouldn't cast stones. Who's going to win the SYM-1 up for bid on eBay right now, BTW?

Are you sure he wasn't referring to Wheat cents? Indian Head pennies were discontinued in 1908, would be very rare to find one in circulation unless you are VERY VERY old. The only items made in mega numbers that are worth much tend to be something popular and never taken out of the original packaging (unused mint state). Very few people tend to buy something and never take it out of the box. There were probably hundreds of thousands of Joe DiMaggio's rookie baseball cards made, but the odds of one making it to this date in mint condition with perfect centering are rare so the card is worth money. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Roger Merchberger" <zmerch at 30below.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 8:23 PM Subject: Re: Collecting, was: ZX80 to had market. less

Anything that I get in that state won't remain in that state for long :-). I find it very unpleasant not to use a classic computer (or other electronic, mechanical, etc device). I think I've mentioned before that I once bought a still-in-shrink-wrap HP71B service manual. That manual is moderately rare anyway (only normally issued to service centres). Of course the first thing I did with it was rip off the wrapping and start reading it. I had (and have) no interest in it as an investment, I want to learn how the 71B works and how to repair it. -tony

Chuck Guzis wrote: Me too - but people often get tied to a particular manufacturer for nostalgia reasons. Funnily enough, I used to collect Sinclair stuff - but got bored because there just aren't that many different types out there (I wasn't into calculators) and by and large his designs aren't *that* interesting (except as an exercise in how to cut corners) So the Sinclair stuff sat on the shelf and I started collecting interesting hardware from all sorts of manufacturers, without any particular focus. Then I ran out of space and realised that doing that was something of a never-ending job :) So all the Sinclair stuff went to good homes, as did a lot of my other random bits of hardware, and I started collecting Acorn stuff instead - because there's a huge hardware range it's enough to keep my interest, but it's not quite the open-ended "collect anything interesting" job. Of course I ended up seriously collecting Torch and Research Machines stuff too (mainly by accident :) - but items from three manufacturers is enough that I've got lots of cool stuff to mess around with, yet at the same time I can properly worry about preservation and knowledge-gathering issues. Of course I also got involved with the museum too, so I can go and play around with a *far* larger collection of diverse hardware than would be possible at home whenever I want... cheers Jules

Tony Duell wrote: Okay, I'm a little behind on reading the list . . . Still, I feel compelled to reply. Tony, there's a soft spot in my heart for Sinclair and Timex Sinclair machines because the TS1000 (aka ZX81) was my first. It was the only computer I could afford at the time. My exposure to this machine changed my life. The changes might have also occurred if my first computer was a C64, or a PDP-11 -- I'll never know. But I *do* know that using the TS1000 forced me to learn good programming technique in order to get the most out of a minimalist machine. It also taught me that there's almost always *some way* to make things work, despite the limitations of a given piece of hardware. Many people who use Sinclairs today do things with them that the designers themselves said was impossible without hardware modifications -- high-res graphics and high(er) speed data transfer, for example. Just like you, I would have rather had a DEC or HP machine, but, at the time, it was the TS1000 or nothing -- there was simply no other system available for USD$100. Of course, today I have lots of other computers which I use and enjoy, and which are superior in almost every way to the TS1000. But it was my first, so I'm sentimental about it. Best, Glen Goodwin 0/0