Now You Can Probably Afford That Device You Longed for a Decade Ago
cheapskatesguide.org
cheapskatesguide.org
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
Anyone know if I can get one these days?
Now, you start looking at vintage Marantz receivers, GE Super Radios, or an ancient Sun engine analyzer, now you're talking.