It depends, you have to catch the right time window.
Some hardware that was discarded (or sold cheaply on eBay) in large numbers a decade or fifteen years ago, usually as "second hand" University surplus taken out of the recycling bins, is now an expensive collector's items - early 68k Macs, SGI workstations, DEC VAX/MIPS/Alpha machines, black NeXT hardware. Even the prices for puny Commodore VIC20s, C64s or a Nintendo NES have climbed quite a bit - gone are the days when you could buy one at a flea market for a couple of Euros.
Of course, it's much more difficult to restore such a system to working order nowadays. Capacitor failures, dying SCSI disks and leaking batteries are only some of the many problems you face when you actually want to use an old computer instead of just putting it on a shelf (like so many boring computer museums do).
This reminds me that it's time to look after our Tektronix 40xx, TI Explorers and Xerox Stars...
I've gone in the opposite direction. Stuff is just... stuff. It breaks down a lot, and while sometimes I wonder if it would be cool to have a PDP-11 or VAX to play with, if I think about it for a while it just makes no sense.
A modern phone has more power than a 90s supercomputer. The classic 90s super-deluxe workstations are easily outclassed by a Raspberry Pi 4, never mind an M1 Mac.
Modern consumer hardware is so unbelievably fast and powerful it's a much more exciting thing to play with.
I somewhat agree with this, save for in the fine details.
Emulation is good until a point; often button response latency is off, audio is mixed incorrectly, and CRT rendering artifacts are not properly accounted for.
For instance, I keep a grey brick Gameboy around for noodling with LSDJ about once or twice a year. The bass response is just lovely.
There's a whole community that harvests and covets SID chips because emulation just doesn't nail it.
There's a retro gaming convention in Vancouver every year, or was before Covid, and there's a few crews of musicians with classic hardware. I recommend checking it out just to hear the difference analog hardware makes.
There have been so many advances in emulation that I would say a lot of this isn't true anymore. You can pretty much get next to flawless emulation of anything PSX and older (with much of the newer stuff more than good enough for playing even if not exact replica), and with runahead you can match or beat original device latency.
I've never seen a "CRT" shader that comes anywhere close to the quality of art representation of Neo Geo titles as my MVS and its recapped Wells Gardner.
And those "scanlines" ones are just sad.
To say nothing of my experiences with sound quality and input latency.
Timing is everything in old games, change that and you change the experience into something different. Not to say it's better or worse, but it's not the same.
And on the computer side of the fence, although modern machines are outrageously powerful, responsiveness is becoming something of an endangered species, but on early to mid 90s Macs it's the rule for all but the most demanding applications.
Especially if retrofitted with flash storage of some kind, those old Macs often wait for you more frequently than you wait for them. And while the OS isn't great at multitasking, that could be seen as a feature — instead of tens of tabs and a dock full of programs open, you're forced to focus only on the 1-3 apps that can be open before classic Mac OS multitasking breaks down.
I'm seriously considering setting up an old pre-OS X Mac of some flavor as a zen mode writing machine for this reason.
If you're not tied to the idea of owning the actual hardware then you get emulate these to tool around in the software side of things, maybe relive the glory days of DCL vs Bash flame wars.
I got rid of a lot of my old game consoles when I realized that I didn't really appreciate the trouble of having them all connected when the games were equally playable on other devices I owned anyway. Actually pretty freeing.
I think the one thing we've lost is the complete "down to the register" accessibility and the close coupling of hardware and software. You can write your own boot code from bare metal and actually make useful things happen based on data sheets.
It's concievable to grasp an entire 8086 or 68000 system in that way, but the Raspberry Pi, for all its benefits, is almost certainly going to be dealt with with relatively high-level languages and abstractions.
> A modern phone has more power than a 90s supercomputer. The classic 90s super-deluxe workstations are easily outclassed by a Raspberry Pi 4, never mind an M1 Mac.
And this power is used to run levels over levels of abstactions.
C compilers on phones ? no way. I got some BASIC interpretter on my phone which makes a ZX Spectrum look elegant in comparison. Text is hard on a smartphone screen. Graphics is also hard.
> Modern consumer hardware is so unbelievably fast and powerful it's a much more exciting thing to play with.
See above. In the past you had limited computer power now you have limited screen. And the new trend in UX design does not help either.
For sure. I managed to snag a "second hand" University NeXT Computer (the 1st gen Cube) for a few bucks on eBay a number of years ago with the Frog Design monitor, and a 68040 upgrade board. Going for almost $3000 now on eBay based on completed listings. The upgrade board alone is $600.
I also managed to snag a 2nd gen 128kb Macintosh for $5 at a second hand computer shop.
Yeah, old games hardware pricing seems to follow a U shape, with the ps2 and original Xbox currently occupying the bottom of it. Anything older/rarer is climbing back up the other side
Yeah, those DEC machines are pretty expensive right now. I was mildly surprised at how much it would cost me to get a DEC AlphaServer (not HP or Compaq), let alone with freight shipping as they’re always on the opposite end of the country as me. Unfortunately all the retro stuff I have in my wishlist now are rare enough to be in the thousands at least.
I remember reading stories of kids finding S/360s on Government auction sites for dirt cheap. Sadly government auction sites never have anything cool whenever I look.
> This reminds me that it's time to look after our Tektronix 40xx, TI Explorers and Xerox Stars...
I’m still waiting to see if I’ll ever find one of the Tektronix 44xx Smalltalk workstations. Even some of the more rare machines in my wishlist I’ve seen for sale, even if they were far out of my price range, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen on of those period.
Having said that, I'll keep my vintage 6809 machine with custom polygon rasterizer ASIC and bit-slice mathbox coprocessor. Such an unusual combination of hardware.
That's true. As a former SGI admin I bought an Indy several years ago for about 150 Euros, including the CRT which is as bulky as it gets. Now it's almost impossible to find one on eBay (in Europe at least). (I sold mine shortly after I bought it because it was so slow and took a lot of space).
I realized this and its why I still have a couple of G3 and G4 mac laptops that I could have purchased a decade after the turn of the century, when I originally wanted them
The tricky thing isn't really the devices themselves but the stuff like batteries and hard disks they come with, like the article says. I at least try to spin them up once every 6 months or so to make sure the lubricants and whatnot don't break down in storage.
I similarly have a bunch of 2000-2006 era PowerPC Mac hardware from the crazy aesthetic hayday that time was.
The iMac G4, in particular; is such a work of art. I’ve got two.
You can actually get little adapters to put solid state drives in a lot of them, and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser gets rid of a lot of scuffs and makes things like new.
The adjustable screens on those were such a cool design, one of my schools had that for the instructor in the computer lab (and eMacs for the students).
Weirdly, that G4 "sunflower" form factor was only around for two and a half years (early 2002 to mid 2004). They followed that with the iMac G5 mid 2004, and then swapped the processor to Intel a year and a half later (bummer for anyone who bought that G5), keeping the design unchanged.
Then the 2007 redesign with aluminum chin and curved back stuck around for 14 years (from 2007 to 2021), still in production if you don't want the M1.
Most of these things are kinda useless without software support anymore though. Like where are you going to get any apps for an iphone 4 with the ancient OS? If you can find FOSS software replacements for some of these things like laptops you might be in luck, but things like old smart phones might as well be bricks, sadly.
To be honest I mostly feel like I have the opposite problem this article describes. I have plenty of old working electronics that I pretty much can't give away because nobody wants it, but I feel bad throwing away something functional. I really wish these things weren't abandoned so quickly by the companies that make them.
There are charities that take old electronics to give to people who need them. I don't want to list any here since I'd have to do a background look to see if they're any good, but many come up on searching.
As someone who volunteered a lot at a charity thrift store, this can be problematic advice. If you don't know anyone who wants it, the charity probably doesn't either.
With old phones for example, if it's years beyond OS updates, and hardly any apps in the App/Play stores will work on it, at this point it's really just a collector's item, or garbage. Poorer people don't want non-functional products, either.
I was thinking of charities that specifically take old electronics to refurbish and give to people, not thrift shops where it'd rot on the shelf. Just stuff so people who, for example, might not have have a consistent home or the means to get a phone are reachable by social services.
This was a bigger thing years ago, but maybe it's not as much anymore. All I could find was Cell Phones For Soldiers.
Someone who desperately needs a smartphone (if you're homeless, a smartphone is much better than a laptop or desktop, even if you are wifi only and can't even swing $15/mo prepaid sim), needs a $50 current phone (widely available), not a $50 obsolete formerly fancy phone.
Old Thinkpads are the best! My x201 is plugging away hosting a media server, NAS, and a couple other home-lab goodies. At under $100 to max it out, it was definitely a steal.
I have a couple of t420s running Arch Linux off of small SSDs. They're really handy to keep in a garage to watch how-to videos, read digital manuals, etc. while working on projects. They're new enough to have hardware video acceleration and cheap enough I don't worry about getting them a little dirty.
I'm not sure about that exact size, but I was looking into large e-readers a while ago, and roughly (perhaps exactly?) A4-sized ones do exist. From memory they were all pretty expensive, and I'm not sure I found one whose quality I was confident of. I don't have any links from back then but a search turned up this reddit thread, where the top comment includes a few suggestions: https://www.reddit.com/r/ereader/comments/89gnax/im_looking_...
Around 1985, looking at a Commodore Plus/4 at K-mart, I realized that in a few years I can probably just get it at a flea market for a few bucks. Over the years I have got so many classic computers by waiting and being on the lookout. With eBay I got things that would have been even harder to find if I just looked locally.
Also long-time collector tip: collecting goes in waves, one generation eventually ages out or cleans out their closet and there's bargains for the next, Especially when newer tech hits the market. (i.e. current trend for emulated/re-created systems that take up a whole lot less space than the original hardware, so some people may get those and pass on the old stuff to make space).
Agreed, the author mentions this, but then kind of ignores the fact that today's hardware is only useful with compatible software, and today's software is primarily an inter-related ecosystem, not isolated apps.
That is, many of those devices can only load years-old OSes, and in some cases then can only load years-old browsers, and many of today's websites won't work on years-old browsers.
I can't say that I think of ten year old stuff as being particularly old. I've got the normal pile of early Thinkpads and a couple of cheap desktops but don't lust after them, it's just that new is too expensive (plus, stuff like OpenBSD will definitely run on a T420).
Now, you start looking at vintage Marantz receivers, GE Super Radios, or an ancient Sun engine analyzer, now you're talking.
A reminder that this is highly variable. Sure, that Tungsten E2 might be twenty bucks but a working Clie TH-55 is $250 and up. A working OQO is $400 and up. A Sony x505, maybe the prettiest laptop ever made, is $400 and up for a unit in poor condition.
Lately, I've been immensely enjoying buying up last-gen's overpriced gimmicky hardware for dirt cheap. I'm typing this from a top-of-the-line late-model 12" MacBook (the one with only a single USB-C port) that I got for $430, probably a fourth of what it cost when new. If anything it's even better to use now than when it was new, since the USB-C and wireless ecosystems have both matured so much since it was released. It makes for a perfect second laptop, just like all the review outlets said it would've been if it weren't for the price. And like the article says, the process of finding it on eBay and waiting for it to arrive was just as satisfying as if I'd bought it new.
I also got an LG G8X and its folding screen attachment for less than $200. I can't wait for the Galaxy Fold 2 to be less than $500, that's probably what I'll go for next.
Unfortunately my track record of "That Device I Longed For" has a habit of not matching what other people wanted, so what I longed for wasn't made in enough quantity and went straight from "expensive" to "rare"
...or "only collectors/completionists want that" when I want the damn thing to actually /use/ it.
I'm kind of glad I didn't splurge on too many guitar effects pedals back in the day. Behringer has cloned much of the BOSS line, now available at a fraction of the cost.
And if you're more of a bedroom musician, there's software that'll cover the majority of sounds, with a few oddball exceptions. That's why I mostly collect guitar pedals that aren't being made in software, or that I am too lazy to emulate by stringing multiple things together.
Old HP Proliant tower servers make great Linux lab machines. Super reliable, great parts availability and upgradeable, also well supported by linux.
I use an old ML 330 G6 with dual xeons and soon to have 64Gb of memory as a dev box. Fantastic for VMs and emulators, containerd etc. I did throw a cheap video card in it and dual 1Gb drives running the simplest raid available in the bios. It rocks. Current ebay price around $200 in working condition. Team it with a couple of charity shop monitors.
I have a few rules I follow in regards to buying non-essentials.
* Never pre order anything
* Never buy limited editions or limitied runs
* If I find a strong urge to buy something, I really try to imagine how I would use it (if at all) or if I have other things that fill this use case already
* If I can see myself using it, or having a need for it, but not an immediate one, I write it on a list.
* Look over the list every so often, and then perhaps buy the thing after a few months have passed since I wrote it down.
Most of the time I just end up removing the items of the list.
55 comments
[ 217 ms ] story [ 1123 ms ] threadSome hardware that was discarded (or sold cheaply on eBay) in large numbers a decade or fifteen years ago, usually as "second hand" University surplus taken out of the recycling bins, is now an expensive collector's items - early 68k Macs, SGI workstations, DEC VAX/MIPS/Alpha machines, black NeXT hardware. Even the prices for puny Commodore VIC20s, C64s or a Nintendo NES have climbed quite a bit - gone are the days when you could buy one at a flea market for a couple of Euros.
Of course, it's much more difficult to restore such a system to working order nowadays. Capacitor failures, dying SCSI disks and leaking batteries are only some of the many problems you face when you actually want to use an old computer instead of just putting it on a shelf (like so many boring computer museums do).
This reminds me that it's time to look after our Tektronix 40xx, TI Explorers and Xerox Stars...
A modern phone has more power than a 90s supercomputer. The classic 90s super-deluxe workstations are easily outclassed by a Raspberry Pi 4, never mind an M1 Mac.
Modern consumer hardware is so unbelievably fast and powerful it's a much more exciting thing to play with.
Emulation is good until a point; often button response latency is off, audio is mixed incorrectly, and CRT rendering artifacts are not properly accounted for.
For instance, I keep a grey brick Gameboy around for noodling with LSDJ about once or twice a year. The bass response is just lovely.
There's a whole community that harvests and covets SID chips because emulation just doesn't nail it.
There's a retro gaming convention in Vancouver every year, or was before Covid, and there's a few crews of musicians with classic hardware. I recommend checking it out just to hear the difference analog hardware makes.
And those "scanlines" ones are just sad.
To say nothing of my experiences with sound quality and input latency.
Especially if retrofitted with flash storage of some kind, those old Macs often wait for you more frequently than you wait for them. And while the OS isn't great at multitasking, that could be seen as a feature — instead of tens of tabs and a dock full of programs open, you're forced to focus only on the 1-3 apps that can be open before classic Mac OS multitasking breaks down.
I'm seriously considering setting up an old pre-OS X Mac of some flavor as a zen mode writing machine for this reason.
It's concievable to grasp an entire 8086 or 68000 system in that way, but the Raspberry Pi, for all its benefits, is almost certainly going to be dealt with with relatively high-level languages and abstractions.
And this power is used to run levels over levels of abstactions. C compilers on phones ? no way. I got some BASIC interpretter on my phone which makes a ZX Spectrum look elegant in comparison. Text is hard on a smartphone screen. Graphics is also hard.
> Modern consumer hardware is so unbelievably fast and powerful it's a much more exciting thing to play with.
See above. In the past you had limited computer power now you have limited screen. And the new trend in UX design does not help either.
I also managed to snag a 2nd gen 128kb Macintosh for $5 at a second hand computer shop.
I remember reading stories of kids finding S/360s on Government auction sites for dirt cheap. Sadly government auction sites never have anything cool whenever I look.
> This reminds me that it's time to look after our Tektronix 40xx, TI Explorers and Xerox Stars...
I’m still waiting to see if I’ll ever find one of the Tektronix 44xx Smalltalk workstations. Even some of the more rare machines in my wishlist I’ve seen for sale, even if they were far out of my price range, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen on of those period.
Ohhhh even a "free" mainframe is NOT cheap
You need a LOT of space, power, time and patience.
Not to mention rigging, pallets and trucking.
Having said that, I'll keep my vintage 6809 machine with custom polygon rasterizer ASIC and bit-slice mathbox coprocessor. Such an unusual combination of hardware.
The tricky thing isn't really the devices themselves but the stuff like batteries and hard disks they come with, like the article says. I at least try to spin them up once every 6 months or so to make sure the lubricants and whatnot don't break down in storage.
The iMac G4, in particular; is such a work of art. I’ve got two.
You can actually get little adapters to put solid state drives in a lot of them, and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser gets rid of a lot of scuffs and makes things like new.
Weirdly, that G4 "sunflower" form factor was only around for two and a half years (early 2002 to mid 2004). They followed that with the iMac G5 mid 2004, and then swapped the processor to Intel a year and a half later (bummer for anyone who bought that G5), keeping the design unchanged.
Then the 2007 redesign with aluminum chin and curved back stuck around for 14 years (from 2007 to 2021), still in production if you don't want the M1.
To be honest I mostly feel like I have the opposite problem this article describes. I have plenty of old working electronics that I pretty much can't give away because nobody wants it, but I feel bad throwing away something functional. I really wish these things weren't abandoned so quickly by the companies that make them.
With old phones for example, if it's years beyond OS updates, and hardly any apps in the App/Play stores will work on it, at this point it's really just a collector's item, or garbage. Poorer people don't want non-functional products, either.
This was a bigger thing years ago, but maybe it's not as much anymore. All I could find was Cell Phones For Soldiers.
Anyone know if I can get one these days?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735962
Also long-time collector tip: collecting goes in waves, one generation eventually ages out or cleans out their closet and there's bargains for the next, Especially when newer tech hits the market. (i.e. current trend for emulated/re-created systems that take up a whole lot less space than the original hardware, so some people may get those and pass on the old stuff to make space).
There are of course better radios available today.
That is, many of those devices can only load years-old OSes, and in some cases then can only load years-old browsers, and many of today's websites won't work on years-old browsers.
Now, you start looking at vintage Marantz receivers, GE Super Radios, or an ancient Sun engine analyzer, now you're talking.
I also got an LG G8X and its folding screen attachment for less than $200. I can't wait for the Galaxy Fold 2 to be less than $500, that's probably what I'll go for next.
...or "only collectors/completionists want that" when I want the damn thing to actually /use/ it.
https://www.tonestart.com/ultimate-behringer-guitar-pedal-cl...
(Not to mention things like Axe-Fx, which while not cheap, can clone 100s of amps, cabinets, and pedals.)
I use an old ML 330 G6 with dual xeons and soon to have 64Gb of memory as a dev box. Fantastic for VMs and emulators, containerd etc. I did throw a cheap video card in it and dual 1Gb drives running the simplest raid available in the bios. It rocks. Current ebay price around $200 in working condition. Team it with a couple of charity shop monitors.
* Never pre order anything
* Never buy limited editions or limitied runs
* If I find a strong urge to buy something, I really try to imagine how I would use it (if at all) or if I have other things that fill this use case already
* If I can see myself using it, or having a need for it, but not an immediate one, I write it on a list.
* Look over the list every so often, and then perhaps buy the thing after a few months have passed since I wrote it down.
Most of the time I just end up removing the items of the list.