Value of classics: (was: Re: Bay Area: IBM 4341 and HP3000)

[Tapley, Mark]

All,

On Jan 11, 2015, at 8:29 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:

> Most obsolete cars and computers end up kept for nostalgia, or as
> ornaments and toys.
> Few, other than ARDs, use the really old ones for their daily driving.

	Drove my ’77 Datsun B210 to work today, and drove the ’68 Plymouth Sport Suburban (like a Fury III wagon) to pick up my daughter at orchestra practice yesterday. Those are actually my daily drivers. 

	But, they are not orders of magnitude slower than the other cars on the road; they blend in nicely with traffic, have very similar brake and turn signals, etc.; that may be a differentiating factor from my “classic” computing hardware, as Fred correctly points out. They are indeed less reliable, but not by any means orders of magnitude less reliable.

	On the subject of broadcasting offers; from a point of view of any individual collector, price is driven up and availability down, and I understand this is seen as a bad thing.

	From the point of view of the aritfact itself, and of maintaining it into the future, getting it into the hands of the person willing to pay the most for it seems to me to be a good thing. Any item for which someone has paid $1000 is less likely to be thrown out by estate managers than the same item if it cost only $100 or “free for pickup”. So although I’ve personally missed out on some really nice systems that I was interested in because they were more widely publicized, I’m willing to grin and bear the loss, thinking that the systems found a home that’ll take even better care of them than I would have.