Nerds Come Of Age
Here's an interesting article on a subject both loved and hated around here at times: old computers. More specifically, the collecting of old computers. Which, believe it or not, is becoming quite a hot item.
CALIFORNIA: In the first purchase of his collection, Sellam Ismail loaded the trunk of his car with old computers he stumbled upon at a flea market for $5 apiece. Soon he had filled his three-car garage with what others would consider obsolete junk.
Years later, his collection of early computers, printers, and related parts is piled high across shelves and in chaotic heaps in a 4,500-square-foot warehouse near Silicon Valley. And it is worth real money.
Even as the power and speed of today's computers make their forerunners look ever punier, a growing band of collectors are gathering retro computers, considering them important relics and even good investments.
"There has been a real steep upward trend in prices in the last year, year and a half," said Ismail, 38. "It seems it's become like the new collectible to moneyed people. Before it was just nerds and hobbyists."
He states his own affiliation clearly: he wears a black T shirt with the word "nerd" on the front. He recently brought a quarter-century old Xerox Star computer back to life to be used as evidence in a patent lawsuit.
The pride of his collection is an Apple Lisa, one of the first computers (introduced in 1983) with a now standard graphical interface. Such items sell for more than $10,000.
PIGS
In an old barn in Northern California that also houses pigs, Bruce Damer, 45, keeps a collection that includes a Cray 1 supercomputer, a Xerox Alto (an early microcomputer introduced in 1973) and early Apple prototypes.
"For me the fascination with these artifacts are that they are living histories — especially if they can be kept running — and that they are the key innovations that affect all of our lives more than anything else here in the 21st Century," Damer said.
Makes me wish I'd kept some of the old stuff I used to have. Like the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A that was the first one I owned. I think it was garaged saled years ago - I think it still worked, too. Collecting old hardware. Think of them as comic books with microchips!
Geek Stuff | Gaius Wednesday, 11 April , 2007
By crosspatch, Wednesday, 11 April , 2007 @ 8:41 pm
I have an Apple //e Platinum and a //c with an rgb color monitor if you want one
I think I have a couple of old Sun “lunch box” computers too … an IPC and an IPX.
By Gaius, Wednesday, 11 April , 2007 @ 9:02 pm
Heh- at the moment the battle is to keep the “Wintels” alive! I’m finding that Dell computers run Ubuntu Linux flawlessly, though - I mean completely, rock-solid stable. Every, single, Dell I own runs it with no problems or issues at all. Some wireless cards need to get tweaked to run, but the basic platforms work perfectly. (Look for Dell to start shipping Linux boxes soon, my guess. And Microsoft to go bananas about that shortly thereafter.)
Funny thing - that old P-II laptop I got for my son is a tank. It runs like a champ, lasts forever (close to four hours on a charge) with the new battery I got for it and is completely stable running Windows 98. Progress is an iffy term sometimes.
By Callimachus, Wednesday, 11 April , 2007 @ 9:30 pm
Damn, I had that same TI. Bought it at Abraham and Strauss in, must have been 1983. Used to play Space Invaders on it. I’d love to find one and show my son, just for laughs.
By Gaius, Wednesday, 11 April , 2007 @ 10:24 pm
Heh - I have a Sega Genesis system that still runs just fine - and the kids, even with PS-2 and a Game Cube )along with a bunch of PCs) STILL play that thing quite often. They enjoy it a lot.
I miss the TI - it actually was a very solid platform. I had a lot of fun with the darn thing - including Space Invaders.
By guy, Thursday, 12 April , 2007 @ 10:51 am
I still have my Ti-99/4a, and the Atari 130XE that I bought to replace it(it’s got 128 KILObytes of RAM!! WOOT!!!)
Unfortunately, at the time I was in the early stages of my hardware nerdishness and tore both apart to see how they worked. Now neither do
By wheels, Thursday, 12 April , 2007 @ 2:57 pm
So, if an Apple Lisa is worth $10k, it means that it’s suffered no depreciation since introduction.
I remember when it came out, one of the magazine reviews said, more or less, “Sure, it’s $10,000 and an IBM PC is $2000, but by the time you get the IBM into comparable shape, you’ll have spent $10,000.”
By BubbaB, Friday, 13 April , 2007 @ 3:50 pm
I still have my TI 99/4A and a Tandy Color Computer 2. I wrote my first basic program at age 9 on the TI, and became pretty good at programming on the CoCo 2 - using a tape deck for storage - by the time I was 14. I had written my own drawing program that would print out the picture on a dot matrix printer that would only print one 1×7 column at a time.
Bow to me, you geek impostors!!
By Gaius, Friday, 13 April , 2007 @ 8:28 pm
You are a regular Geek God, BubbaB. Would that be Appleodonus?