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Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

#71

Post by AnimalMuppet »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #63
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #19

My brother in law died last year and left over a hundred vintage computers and game consoles - mostly in boxes (stacks of Amigas) - it was hard for us to work out what was rare/valuable from what wasn't. He was also saving them for some mythical time in the future where he would sort them out and play with them. At least find the time to open the boxes and document what you've got and whether it works. Ideally you'd…

> it was hard for us to work out what was rare/valuable from what wasn't. If there are any collectors or hoarders here, Please heed this warning. Eventually you won't be around to take care of your collection. It will eventually be passed down to someone who doesn't want it, and wants to get rid of it. My dad is a hoarder. There is tons of junk, but there are a few gems mixed in. The problem is, once I inherit it, I…

We're going through this right now. There are hoarder cleanup companies that can help. They're pricey, but we didn't have time and energy to haul out seven dumpsters full of stuff.

Then there are "estate sale" people. They sell the things that are worth money, and give you have of what they make. They keep the other half as their fee.

The problem is if you have to do both - if there's massive amounts of actual trash, but also a fair amount of good stuff. But at least we had some ideas of what categories of things probably included good stuff, so we didn't let the hoarder cleanup people take those.

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

#72

Post by brudgers »

The signed Apple II's are a good place to start thinking about your thinking about collecting.

What I mean is that do you want to be the kind of collector that has two singed Apple II's?

Or the kind of collector that has a signed Apple II?

Or the kind of collector that once had a signed Apple II, but moved it on because it no longer fits within the collection?

There's nothing wrong with any of those.

Except perhaps in so far as choosing one path that makes you unhappy.

Because your hobby should not make you unhappy (I won't go as far as saying it should make you happy).

Now is the perfect time to think about this because moving house is a bit of a reboot on how we identify ourselves...if for no other reason than "now I live in Omaha."

Good luck

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

#73

Post by vax425 »

I was in a similar position with Apple ][, PET, Atari, AT&T, and DEC hardware.

I decided to keep and focus only on vintage computers that (nearly) fit in a shoebox, so now I have a much smaller collection by volume but about the same number of systems, like Atari Lynx, Tandy Model 100, Sinclair ZX 81, Poqet PC… Much easier to display and move!

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

#75

Post by krallja »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #63
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #19

My brother in law died last year and left over a hundred vintage computers and game consoles - mostly in boxes (stacks of Amigas) - it was hard for us to work out what was rare/valuable from what wasn't. He was also saving them for some mythical time in the future where he would sort them out and play with them. At least find the time to open the boxes and document what you've got and whether it works. Ideally you'd…

> it was hard for us to work out what was rare/valuable from what wasn't. If there are any collectors or hoarders here, Please heed this warning. Eventually you won't be around to take care of your collection. It will eventually be passed down to someone who doesn't want it, and wants to get rid of it. My dad is a hoarder. There is tons of junk, but there are a few gems mixed in. The problem is, once I inherit it, I…

Also, if your stuff burns down in a fire, you’re more likely to get some insurance money back if you have a well-maintained list of items, serial numbers, purchase price, etc., rather than depending on your post-trauma brain.

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

#76

Post by krallja »

sjducb wrote: post #74

Sell the Apple II computers. You don't want anything that valuable in your house. https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/20/steve-jobs-signed-manua...

OTOH, Woz will sign anything that’s put in front of him. He’s always tried to be friendly with his fans! Jobs was a bit more… uh, driven. Also he’s dead: no longer available to sign hardware.

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

#77

Post by krallja »

ghaff wrote: post #53
bloopernova wrote: post #41

In my experience there's this weird unspoken "rule" regarding collecting something like Lego, computers, keyboards, cars, etc, that you're never allowed to shrink your collection, just grow it forever. Maybe think of it as curating or collating your collection? There may be museums that would take your items, and you can be sure that they'll be cared for correctly by experts.

>There may be museums that would take your items, and you can be sure that they'll be cared for correctly by experts. Probably not. Museums and archives have vast collections that are never displayed. The Computer History Museum in Boston closed quite a few years ago and AFAIK, the majority of their collection has never seen the light of day since. It costs a lot of money to display and care for vintage equipment.

The Computer Museum in Boston merged with The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, which received nearly all of TCM’s artifacts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Museum,_Boston#...

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

#78

Post by yellowapple »

Well I'd be happy to take some of those off your hands ;)

> I don't have anywhere nice to display them

That seems like a good goal, then: find somewhere nice to display them.

My grandpa got into an O-scale train collecting kick in his retirement, and inadvertently stumbled upon someone in a very similar predicament to you, except with trains and train paraphernalia instead of computers. This guy had (and still has!) multiple model train layouts in multiple scales, countless other toy trains from throughout the last century or so, a bunch of actual railroad equipment and signals and such, random collectibles from when he worked for Western Pacific, you name it. Well, he needed money so he started selling some of his stuff, but he and my grandpa got to talking and realized that it was a sufficiently-large collection of museum-quality pieces to, well, start a museum.

Said man happens to live in the same town as my uncle (my grandpa's brother), and said town (technically a "city", but it's your stereotypical American small town) had a museum in an old church that was (IIRC) at this point condemned as structurally unsound. The "city", meanwhile, also needed a new town hall, and the local senior center wanted to move its thrift store to a new location.

This train collector's newfound desire to "loan" a large chunk of his collection to the museum was the last push needed for the city council to go ahead and bite the bullet on a new "city center": they bought the town's old middle school, and my grandparents, my uncle, the train collector, the museum curator, myself, and a couple other locals all pitched in to clean out and renovate the building, and we ended up with a pretty nice (by middle-of-nowhere standards) "City Center", a solid quarter of which consists almost entirely of just this train collector's stuff (including an O-scale approximate portrayal of the town). Place is still proudly up and running (I still maintain the website and head out every couple months to run "sudo zypper ref && sudo zypper dup" on the museum's desktop), and it's still expanding, with a G-scale outdoor layout under construction.

I guess that story's a roundabout suggestion that you should start a museum (or find an existing one) in your own town. That way, a lot more people than just yourself will get to enjoy what you've collected, and there will be ample local motivation to keep your collection both intact and in working order even when you're no longer either of those things ;)

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

#79

Post by toast0 »

ghaff wrote: post #39
h2odragon wrote: post #15

> In favor of selling them I would probably get maybe a number of thousand dollars which would help buy a house Prepping them for sale will be real work; which you sound like you have enough of already. If you believe their value to be high and it turns out no one will bid anything like that much on them, you may become discouraged and more attached to them. It may be worth turning of the stack of "to be disposed of"…

Locating another packrat who possibly has plenty of money is probably hard and an organization that would spend a lot of time and money to properly sort through and maybe display some of the gear even harder. It's somewhat painful to say but just because there are almost certainly people in the world who would monetarily value a bunch of obsolete stuff doesn't mean it's worth trying to track down those people. And be…

I don't think they're suggesting finding someone who values the collection so much as someone who will take care of the chores of listing and shipping that's involved.

If the alternatives are keep it all (undesirable because of space use, etc), sell it yourself (undesirable because of time use and disappointment), dumping it (undesirable because it's good stuff), or letting someone else sell it... Well you're not going to get the monetary value of the collection, but at least it's probably going to someone willing to pay for it... And hopefully they don't let it sit in boxes forever.

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my vintage computer collection?

#80

Post by rufus_foreman »

Keep what you have a personal connection to, you'll never be able to get it back. Not because you'll never be able to afford it, but because it won't exist.

I had a C-64 at one point with a disk drive and a bunch of disks. I could buy a C-64 and a drive for it and games for it, but it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be the disk drive that broke over and over and that I somehow took apart and fixed without knowing anything about how to fix a disk drive. And it wouldn't be the collection of games that I played in 1982, some of which I remember and some of which I've forgotten, and it wouldn't have some of the first software I ever tried to write, or the games I typed in line by line from magazines. And it wouldn't have the games that I would crack so that my name came up as the author on the startup screen.

Same thing with the Apple ][ my step-dad had that I used to use. He has no idea where it went, he thought I had it. I could buy an Apple ][ but I can't buy my old Apple ][.

I regret losing all of that stuff, computers, books, music, collectibles, any of it that I had a personal connection to. I have no idea what happened to Rosebud.

If it's just stuff you bought as part of a collection and you don't really have a connection to it, then don't worry about it. Sell it for what you can get, take half of the proceeds to spend now, throw the other half in the stock market and if you want to build a collection again 20 years from now you'll have some cash.

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