Selling keyboards without the terminal

[Al Kossow]

On 10/20/18 10:05 PM, William Donzelli via cctalk wrote:
> It's Beanie Babies all over again, people. Give it a year or two and the
> keyboard market will likely crash.

I don't see it happening, unless someone turns up a warehouse full of the
things cheap to drive supply up.

All I hear about are guys with warehouses scrapping CRTs, and those are
80's & 90's commodity ASCII terminals. The only terminal keyboards still
turning up in volume are Wyse because the rest were junk that got flaky
10+ years ago.

Beanie Babies were sold as collectables, and millions were made.

CRT terminals aren't collectable. You don't flip them. There are a handful
of interest to collectors, like VT100s.

Before Hercules, no one cared about CU terminals because there was nothing
you could do with them without the knowledge of the care and feeding of
IBM big iron. Even twinax was pretty out there. Only 'corestore' ever showed
much of anything in that world. So now, all of that is pretty much obsolete
and getting thrown out by the warehouse load. Hell, even I ended up with 10
3191 terminals recently because they would have been tossed.

Because of my job, I have to think about what the museum needs to collect
at the bottom of the supply bathtub curve, and I get nervous when things
start to come up on the tail side.