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Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

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Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#231

Post by rekabis »

ilamont wrote: post #208
fl7305 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I see classic 1970s-80s computers that I'm interested in selling for hundreds or even thousands of dollars on eBay etc. Gen-Xers who grew up with them are getting nostalgic, and many of them have a lot of disposable income and plenty of space to house them. But it is a lot of work to get that kind of money for each individual machine. And I suspect it will be a passing fad. In some decades when the Gen-Xers sta…

We've seen this play out before. This couple in Wisconsin stocked up on antique phones when the demand was hot in the 1980s, now they are in their 80s and they can't get rid of them: https://madison.com/news/local/phoneco-wisconsin-telephones-...

They should advertise up here in Canada. Functional rotary phones are selling like hotcakes for $50-80 a pop. Especially original non-standard (not-black) colours.

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#232

Post by kragen »

Suzuran wrote: post #215
maxwell wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you sued DHHS / CMS?

No; It is my understanding you cannot sue the federal government or its constituent parts, they have sovereign immunity.

they have to assert it in court and usually don't

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#233

Post by WorldMaker »

dbish wrote: post #116
spaceguillotine wrote: post #43

Paul Allen sure didn't have great foresight for post death. First Cinerama and now the computer museum. The current sentiment with seattle lifers is that he used Seattle as a playground and didn't actually care about the longevity. EMP now MoPop just keeps hanging on by a thread as well and has gone through lots of turmoil.

Sounds like he was onboard with shutting things down. It wasn’t a foresight thing, more that he wasn’t interested in it going on

Yeah, Foundations with Endowments need business people to run them and manage them and finding ones you trust and creating a corporate culture for them to last is hard. I can't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if Paul Allen wasn't interested in establishing those sorts of legacy foundations for some of the same corporate politics reasons he was said to have struggled with Microsoft over the decades.

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#234

Post by smsm42 »

qludes wrote: post #80
smsm42 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still don't have proper digital preservation mechanisms. If you are an executor of an estate, and you have a website and a twitter account, what you do with them? You are surely not interested in running them by yourself. You can't just leave them alone - website support costs money, and also if left alone, it will inevitably be broken into and cause all kinds of trouble. You can't just sell it to somebody (at lea…

If it's something like a blog archive.org works. And if it's a website people care about it's as simple as giving the archiver/internet historian/data hoarder hobbyist niche to back it all up on ipfs. If they wrote things you can digitize them and turn them into an epub that might last a few hundred years. And you can absolutely donate a website, that's just a matter of picking the right license and hosting the actua…

An one-time snapshot is not the active site under the original domain. You can do a snapshot (even though there's no organized procedure even for that, afaik) but that's not the same as keeping the site running in perpetuity.

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#235

Post by maxwell »

Suzuran wrote: post #215
maxwell wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you sued DHHS / CMS?

No; It is my understanding you cannot sue the federal government or its constituent parts, they have sovereign immunity.

I would never join a cartel like the American Bar Foundation myself, but that's not my understanding.

https://www.aarp.org/health/medicare-insurance/info-2020/obs...

I hope you all the best. We live in a Second World country.

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#236

Post by WorldMaker »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #95
bpodgursky wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's too harsh. A lot of people have a blind spot to their own mortality. He died at 65, far before most people have their affairs in order.

But he was given a diagnosis of cancer. It's not like he was hit by a bus. He had several months.

He was lucky enough to have several decades.

(His original diagnosis with Hodgkin's Lymphoma was in 1983 according to Wikipedia. Most of the these projects in his life through 2018 were under the specter of that cancer. Even the complication of the additional non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 2009 still gave him possibly luckily a few years to have handled some things.)

Not that it makes it that much easier to deal with if you live that much time after a frightening diagnosis, especially because you likely can't know how much time you will actually have. But then again, none of us really know how much time we have. (How's your estate plan? Mine could use work.)

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#237

Post by brudgers »

bruce511 wrote: post #168
dehrmann wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He discovered that selling is different to buying, but that's another thread You got me curious...

When collecting there's a selling price and a buying price. The difference can be -substantial-. For example, stamps have a catalog. Literally a giant book, with all the stamps and variations, and the current value. (Ahem, buying value). Think if it as a giant "vendor neutral" price guide. [1] Now obviously when you come to sell you mostly sell to a dealer. So you expect him to take some margin. He has to make a livi…

Patient buyers are another characteristic of long tail markets on eBay.

The pool of stamp collectors etc. is small relative to say guitar players; there’s not an endless September; and buying from dealers is the “socially acceptable” way of starting.

So potential buyers on eBay tend to be experienced bargain shoppers when it comes to ordinary collectability. They will happily wait for the bragging rights price or at least the no way to lose money price.

Collecting is a hobby. Picking is a business.

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#238

Post by bruce511 »

bombcar wrote: post #226
Kaijo wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a lifelong collector of a variety of (very) niche things, and have at times sold or tried to sell items from my collections, or whole collections at once. You're right about everything, I would only add that each category of thing is its own world in terms of liquidity and how certain you can be of obtaining a guide price. It also pays off to learn about the collector cultures and communities surrounding each typ…

Sometimes the best thing you can do with a collection is bequeath it to someone in the hobby who's much younger.

Weeel.. maybe. The joy in collecting is the collecting. Getting it all at once kinda robs the fun..

But bequething them one or two significant pieces can get them started, and perhaps carries more meaning...

Re: Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items

#239

Post by Basketb926 »

ghaff wrote: post #204
hnlmorg wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it’s only valuable to those who hold value to it because they grew up with it. Once those collectors get old and start dying off, the bottom falls out of the market because subsequent generations don’t have the same nostalgia. and thus those once valuable collectibles are then basically worthless. I have first hand experience of this happening too. My dad collected a specific type of model railway. His…

I enjoyed stamp collecting as a kid. I inherited a stamp album from a distant relative who I think was a clipper ship captain or something along those lines. Was probably worth some money once upon a time. I should look at it one of these days. I'm sure it (and my own collection) are worth nothing today.

Easy thing to do with Unwanted Stamps is Donate to Oxfam Canada. Address to mail your donation to is at this link: https://www.oxfam.ca/take-action/support-oxfam/stamp-out-pov...
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