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Comment by ex-aws-dude | Hacker News Reader

Wow I’m surprised by how high the realized prices are

Who is buying these things? Private collectors?

I think the prices are still really modest if you look at them in perspective. One of the small, irreplaceable stock of surviving PDP-10s could be had for less than the cost of a mediocre used Ferrari.

Antiquities and heirlooms can be a good stable investment, the same reason people trade art or watches or guns or cars. Some of these are fun to use without reducing value.

> Antiquities and heirlooms can be a good stable investment, the same reason people trade art or watches or guns or cars.

It is only an investment if it (likely) gains yield. Otherwise it is just a means of preservation of value.

Most of these things have large categories that are inherently disinflationary. You can't make a new authentic vintage Ferrari. Whether they are fungible is the main problem and case by case. But you generally don't do it to build wealth, it's an expression of it that happens to have yields if taken seriously.

The mystery of how a computer works is what drove me. I was interested in the mass produced microprocessor based systems. Once I found per integrated circuit system it became a combination of logic and hand crafted boards.

This is is the area I focused on. I'm now at point where I would rather shed objects than collect them. I will probably hold on to the rarest handmade objects. The mass produced from the late 70's to the early 2000's I would like to get rid of.

A lot of people had a strong nostalgic attachment to DEC PDPs because they were their first experience of hands-on computing.

So SV always had a community of very wealthy nerds who could afford a used PDP-10 and its insane running and maintenance costs.

But... the community was always very small.

And today, the number of people with that kind of money and a similar nostalgic attachment to increasingly remote history is even smaller.

I am prompted here to ask "Why that name?" Trolling? Lapsed trademark squatting? I recommend a less confusing moniker if this is a genuinely serious attempt at a museum and not just baiting a collector(s) with deep pockets.

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