since he is local to you Zane we elect you to go over and threaten him

broken legs if he disembowels any more neat ho stuff! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh(a)aracnet.com> To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 8:39 PM Subject: Re: This just makes me really SICK

On Jan 17, 2004, at 2:50 PM, Teo Zenios wrote: I'm *not* volunteering for that one.

Being an admin is certainly a creative task (of course it all depends on

admin, you've got intense ones who go down the very tip of the tree levels of admining every aspect of the system to ensure reliability, security and stability and then the lazy admins who think an update or a request is bothering them)... You have to be creative an admining a server, and/or network to create an environment that is well oiled and manageable and scalable, otherwise you spend more time slapping band-aids and shoe strings just to keep it from collapsing on a daily basis. Curt

As the discussion progressed, we decided that there are two types of advanced computer users -system programmers and system administrators.

That in itself is debatable but where our discussion became bogged down was when we tried to decide which user was left brain, and which was right brain. [...]

----- Original Message ----- From: "vrs" <vrs(a)msn.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, January 17, 2004 4:51 PM Subject: Re: This just makes me really SICK http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2781026641&categ… Very few people collect vintage computer equipment, there is no priceguide, and there is no way to contact collectors direct even if you thought it was collectable in the first place. If I find some old coins, guns, baseball cards, stamps, Lionel trains, hummels, cars, gold, silver, records, all I have to do to sell them is to hit the local pawnshop, put an add in a number of auto traders, hit the coin/stamp/baseball shops, hummel shops, scarp buyer, etc. There are dozens of pricequides for these items, and all except cars can be easily stored in your house taking up little space. To a non collector an old mini or mainframe is nothing but a large piece of obsolete equipment only worth its scarp value (steel, aluminum,copper, and gold). The easiest thing to do is have it hauled away for scrap after you rip out any major chips that look like they might have gold in them (cpu's mostly). I remember maybe 10 years ago somebody who built computers and had a photo shop (weird combination?) purchased a minicomputer the size of a sideways refrigerator along with a few dozen diskless terminals that made up the LAN. I asked him what he was going to do with all that stuff and he said he would salvage the keyboards and monitors and resell those while the main computer would be scrapped because the multiple cpu's had allot of gold in them. I remember he said he got the whole lan for just a few dollars at auction and that few people knew that the processors inside the huge machine had a decent amount of gold in them. I bet quite a few people figured out the gold aspect especially since gold prices were high at that time (has gone up quite a bit last year or so also). So you had a machine nobody wanted (he was the only guy who put in a bid) and was only purchased because somebody knew about the gold value (filled the basement of his shop too). If you want to let people know this stuff is worth more then scrap you have to make and publish a price guide showing common equipment at a few times scrap value and machines that are rare at many multiples of their scrap value (pull a number out of your ass basically). You have to include some pictures so people know what the hell it looks like and put a few different prices for different "grades" of preservation (collectors love this) also include the little add-ons to the system and what they are worth. make sure you list dozens of people in this book who are experts in appraising the collectables (basically people here and what they collect plus their phone numbers or email). After you put this together you print a few 100 copies and send them to the local papers computer columnists and they will write an article about it in the paper ( I am sure they are running out of crap to print by now), maybe send a few copies to web magazines like Toms Hardware, Anandtech, etc and they will put something up also, and lastly send a few to the wall street journal. Once people think there is a market for this stuff (hell if there is a priceguide there must be a huge market of suckers who will buy it) they will end up digging around and finding system that they will then end up wanting appraised by YOU (you will end up selling a few catalogs in the process also). The only downside is that machines people would normally pay you to take them away will now have to be purchased (cause its worth money), that and you will find more collectors (more like greedy dealers) in the market. Before you laugh quite a few small hobbies have exploded after people pulled values out of nowhere and published price guides. The companies who made priceguides for baseball cards and then after the explosion started grading services probably make more cash then any dealer ever did. One guy did this for old metal lunchpales and started a decent following. If you looked on ebay lately you will notice quite a lot of mass produced 8/16 bit computers selling way above any scrap value because a group of people started up the retro computing craze. All those who get in before the boom end up making cash at the very least and end up making sure those old machines don't end up getting scrapped (same for books and software which could fill a catalog in itself). Besides more people that get turned on to the hobby the more people that can help you out with problems or pay for your knowledge. Just an idea... TZ

A day will come when when collecting old computers will be an acceptable collectible item and books and guide will be published. Unfortunatly when that day comes, the cost of acquiring an old pdp may be 10-20x more than what we pay now.

Keep in mind that there is often much more than meets the eye. Sure, many microprocessors have gold - you can see it, plain as day. Many other chips that appear quite boring also contain gold - probably 1/2 to 1/3 of the ceramic types do (break a few open - you will see). Even plain old plastic DIP TTL contains gold in a good percentage of chips. Crystals also have gold, and there is often a large amount in metal can

Most scrappers I know don't realize the old machines are more valuable intact (by many times, as pointed out). If you want to save the machines, explain this to them - WITH MONEY IN HAND. Don't try to be a cheapskate - these guys are pretty damn street smart when it comes to eyeing someone over for honesty. Screw them, and you have just condemned a few PDP-8s to death, but treat them, and those PDP-8s will be yours. William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

Maybe, but green talks as well. Loudly, sometimes. Yes folks, the IRS *has* *started* auditing those that use Ebay.

You're right William. We as collectors need to pony up and be willing to

the price over scrap. However, I have delt with a couple scrappers who

me "Oh, I can get $XXX for that in scrap" and I wonder how valid those prices are. How can we know? I believe one scrapper told me that for a 6 foot rack with a 21MX cpu and a small QIC tape drive and small HPIB drive (each of the later units is 19 inches wide, about 4 inches tall, 15 inches deep, and weighs about 15 pounds so we're not talking lots of metal)...

he could get $140 for the scrap metal from it. Is this about right or off-base?

Why you fuzzy-headed Danes must be some sorta communist enveero-mentalists or sumptin! Why here in the US nothing holds back profit, and someone else's grandkids'll clean up the mess. While there are increasingly stringent requirements for some industries, for most there are mostly only faint requirements on toxic material disposal in the U.S. A surplus place I go to here in Calif. has poverty-wage people standing in puddles of mud and goo, chopping copper off transformers with bolt cutters and saws, sorting metals into bins to be shipped to Taiwan. I know the owner. This is common practice. You should see what most auto-wrecker yards do. It's unbelievable what goes on here sometimes.

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Marvin Johnston wrote: Yes, and this would still be going on were it not for the reporter that traveled to China and took photographs of streams piled with waste and little bare-footed kids picking parts out of scary looking electronic

You're right William. We as collectors need to pony up and be willing to pay the price over scrap. However, I have delt with a couple scrappers who tell me "Oh, I can get $XXX for that in scrap" and I wonder how valid those prices are. How can we know? I believe one scrapper told me that for a 6 foot rack with a 21MX cpu and a small QIC tape drive and small HPIB drive (each of the later units is 19 inches wide, about 4 inches tall, 15 inches deep, and weighs about 15 pounds so we're not talking lots of metal)... that he could get $140 for the scrap metal from it. Is this about right or off-base?

You're right William. We as collectors need to pony up and be willing to pay the price over scrap. However, I have delt with a couple scrappers who tell me "Oh, I can get $XXX for that in scrap" and I wonder how valid those prices are. How can we know? I believe one scrapper told me that for a 6 foot rack with a 21MX cpu and a small QIC tape drive and small HPIB drive (each of the later units is 19 inches wide, about 4 inches tall, 15 inches deep, and weighs about 15 pounds so we're not talking lots of metal)... that he could get $140 for the scrap metal from it. Is this about right or off-base?

Jay ----- Original Message ----- From: "William Donzelli" <aw288(a)osfn.org> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> Cc: "On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, January 19, 2004 3:42 PM Subject: Re: This just makes me really SICK gold, carried. --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]

Very few people collect vintage computer equipment, there is no priceguide, and there is no way to contact collectors direct even if you thought it was collectable in the first place. If I find some old coins, guns, baseball cards, stamps, Lionel trains, hummels, cars, gold, silver, records, all I have to do to sell them is to hit the local pawnshop, put an add in a number of auto traders, hit the coin/stamp/baseball shops, hummel shops, scarp buyer, etc. There are dozens of pricequides for these items, and all except cars can be easily stored in your house taking up little space.

If you want to let people know this stuff is worth more then scrap you have to make and publish a price guide showing common equipment at a few times scrap value and machines that are rare at many multiples of their scrap

value (pull a number out of your ass basically). You have to include some

pictures so people know what the hell it looks like and put a few different prices for different "grades" of preservation (collectors love this) also include the little add-ons to the system and what they are worth. make sure

you list dozens of people in this book who are experts in appraising the collectables (basically people here and what they collect plus their phone

numbers or email). After you put this together you print a few 100 copies and send them to the local papers computer columnists and they will write an article about it in the paper ( I am sure they are running out of crap to print by now), maybe send a few copies to web magazines like Toms Hardware, Anandtech, etc and they will put something up also, and lastly send a few to

the wall street journal. Once people think there is a market for this stuff (hell if there is a priceguide there must be a huge market of suckers who will buy it) they will end up digging around and finding system that they will then end up wanting appraised by YOU (you will end up selling a few catalogs in the process also). The only downside is that machines people would normally pay you to take them away will now have to be purchased (cause its worth money), that and you will find more collectors (more like greedy dealers) in the market.

Before you laugh quite a few small hobbies have exploded after people pulled values out of nowhere and published price guides. The companies who made priceguides for baseball cards and then after the explosion started grading services probably make more cash then any dealer ever did. One guy did this

for old metal lunchpales and started a decent following. If you looked on ebay lately you will notice quite a lot of mass produced 8/16 bit computers selling way above any scrap value because a group of people started up the retro computing craze. All those who get in before the boom end up making cash at the very least and end up making sure those old machines don't end up getting scrapped (same for books and software which could fill a catalog

in itself). Besides more people that get turned on to the hobby the more people that can help you out with problems or pay for your knowledge.

Any long term hobby I have ever seen depends on hobbyists and dealers they feed on each other. If a guy can make a few bucks on the side saving and storing computers he will do it, this allows the collector to be able to find people with equipment to keep his hobby going. If there wasn't a market

for corvette parts I wouldn't be able to keep mine running. I don't mind people making a few bucks from any hobby I ever got into because without them there is absolutely no motivation for people "not into" the hobby to keep from throwing things out.

Any hobby goes through a phase where prices go from low to crazy levels followed by the cashout and implosion of pricing. But what you are left with is a stable group of collectors, reasonable prices, large amounts of collectable material that was dug out during the boom, lots of documentation, a set of grading outlines used by everyone, and documented dealers who stock the stuff your looking for and you know where to find them. Having a catalog published makes life allot easier for people just starting out in their hobby.

You mentioned $500 c64's (assuming you meant on ebay) and how people toss them away when they cant get that much out of them. I purchased a c64, c128 on ebay for my collection and paid maybe 30-50 for each with quite a bit of other hardware and accessories. You can look on ebay every day and find reasonable (meaning somebody taking the time to dig an item out, clean it, test it as working or not, take a picture, and pay ebay its cut) prices on these items unlike the Vintage Computer Marketplace the only 1541 disk drive is listed for $50.

Supply and demand from collectors looking at their checkbooks on a specific day decide what is overpriced and what is a deal,

experts can only use their knowledge of the subject to give reasonable guesses at the time of publication what something is worth and which models are worth more then others.

If items sell for more then you think they are worth then you just don't want it as bad as somebody else does.

I have dumped a few dollars into my collection (haven't added it up don't want to either) and have no plan on selling any of it at this time (and I don't regret the expense either).

This is where I think location happens to be more important then effort expended. If your in computer technology heaven (California silicon valley) you probably trip over more equipment then I could find around here (vintage equipment that is). PatrickFinnegans friend with the $2M IBM machine for $21.20 just happens to hit the Purdue University auctions which is hard for people not in that area to do on a regular basis. Your hobby has a business side to it, mine doesn't.

My collecting is mostly in the 80's to 90's personal computer era (stuff I always wanted and didn't have the cash at the time), not the industrial mini -mainframe equipment so unloading pallets isn't something I normally do. Stuff you wouldn't even look at I would probably want.

Which is why good price guides give ranges and are periodically and regularly updated.

> If items sell for more then you think they are worth then > you just don't want it as bad as somebody else does.

True. And equally true, the selling price may also reflect ignorance on the part of the buyer.

If so, does this indicate we are too cheap to save some of these machines?

Why is that? And does this hold for anything from any era that gets to be 30, or is it only from machines that are 30 years old now (and hence might have a higher precious metals content than machines that are only 10-20 years old)?