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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

I really think that the resellers should offer a provenance. "This aeron has been through both the early twenties cryptocurrency bubble and the mid-twenties AI bubble!"

There _has_ to be a collectors' market for this sort of thing. This beanbag was at Theranos!

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There is (a collector's market) of course, the provenance can be hard to come by though. There has always been a joke in the Bay Area about buying the product you helped design and ship at the "DeAnza Flea Market" (which is actually the AVSRO flea market[1] but was held in the DeAnza community college for many years).

There is some nostalgia there, especially from former employees. But generally the 'premium' is limited[2]. Mostly because collectibles have to 'connect' with the collector in some way, and outside of a relatively small community a lot of startup stuff doesn't really make that connection.

[1] https://www.electronicsfleamarket.com/

[2] I have a super rare jacket from "First Person Inc" the wholly owned subsidiary Sun created for Project Green/Oak/Java that has an embroidered 'Fang' (the Java mascot) and the product name 'WebRunner'. Only given out to the original Java team. WebRunner was the name of the Hotjava browser before Sun's lawyers chickened out because Taligent had a similar trademark. I expect it is worth over 10 times what Bryan paid for the logowear t-shirt at Goodwill (0.25) :-). It would probably be worth more if was Gosling's jacket instead of mine.

> an embroidered 'Fang' (the Java mascot)

I thought Duke was the mascot. Is this some earlier mascot?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duke_(Java_mascot)_w...

Joe Palrang (the guy who drew him) and the Java team called him 'Fang' (he looks like a tooth right?) Somebody didn't like that name (I don't recall if it was corporate or Kim Polese) and at some point the word went out that his name was "Duke".

Cool! Thanks for the history :) I genuinely never liked the name. Fang is much better.

it's ASVARO. the SV is silicon valley.

You are correct of course, I mangled the name. At least I got the web site link right :-).

heh - I bought a 17-year old Aeron in 2020 - 2nd best office purchase I ever made. (First was a Brother MFC office-class laser printer in 2016... still going strong, still gets driver updates for new OS's - and still allows me to use 3rd-party or refilled toner carts)

My Brother from 2004 is still going strong

My HP B210 inkjet from 2010 works just as well as it did the day I got it 15 years ago.

Which means it takes about 3 minutes to warm up and make its Willy Wonka-like noises before spitting out a perfectly fine document.

Believe it or not, wireless printing works just fine!

I call that trickle-down ergonomics.

I recall the hosts joking about this on Oxide and Friends, as they worked at Sun in the 90s up through the Sun acquisition. Some of their finds are hilarious. I think Brian had found a "Windows on MIPS" shirt at a thrift store?

Yes -- it was in fact an SGI t-shirt with the top ten reasons to run NT on MIPS (!!). It was even cringier than you might imagine, and included reasons like "SPARC shmark" (?) -- with the number one reason being "it's so fast it hertz."

I would like to believe that this awful shirt was in fact an extraordinary act of subversion from within a once-great SGI, but no one is that good. Anyway, very much worth the twenty five cents I paid for it at the Palo Alto Goodwill!

In 2018, I was in a datacenter 1.5 hours outside of Saigon, Vietnam and they had a Sun Microsystems rack wrapped in plastic just sitting there unused... probably worth at least 1M VND now...

https://imgur.com/a/sun-rack-DOdq2Uc

So, about US$40 you're thinking? Good racks can be pretty expensive... ;)

Great idea. Going to stencil "Property of Sun Microsystems" on some Aerons to instantly increase their resale value!

It might get difficult to acquire lots if they start doing that. I doubt an in-bankrupt-proceedings company wants the provenance of their office gear on the internet. Maybe they can agree to a time delay of X years or months, and only with permission. If they start doing it across the board they could lose significant business. I like the idea though!

If they're getting liquidated via bankruptcy, do they have the right to deny having it advertised in a way that would improve the item sale price?

That's an excellent point. I don't know. I guess it would depend on the creditors.

It Depends(TM), but likely not.

Didn't theranos have a "no killing bugs" policy? I say let them keep the beanbag chairs.

The PawnStars show had a great bit about valuing a hypothetical "Bill Clinton's lawn mower". Famous names dont necessarily make everything more valuable.

I miss the times when stuff went to Weird Stuff for fun browsing.

This Aeron has an authentic Jeff Bezos head sweat stain.

Hope the beanbag wasn't at FTX :P

There's always a lot of real (additionally to non-authentic) merchandise sold on Ebay from defunct startups.

Theranos: https://www.ebay.com/itm/146096029198?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid...

If you can overlook tech company logo embroidering, this is a great way to get really nice soft shell jackets for cheap. Like a Patagonia jacket that retailed for $200 will be $30 on eBay because of a small logo.

Put small ID stamps on everything (or many things). It will start to acquire a history, like a passport or guitar case.

"This aeron offered through a liquidation sale by a company that once resold furniture from defunct dot-com startups, but is now itself going bankrupt"

I have a stapler from Microsoft with Microsoft written on it!

A bunch of random stuff in my apartment came from an old dating startup that listed all their office stuff on craigslist. Went down on a weekend and made silly offers on whatever seemed useful.

Might spawn a new occupation: sniff sommelier!

This should obviously use blockchain!

(jk)

"This coffee machine was at a startup that tried to build a blockchain for tracing the provenance of auction items."

Has a certain Ozymandias ring to it

don't give them ideas

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