I have a Sun Ultra 30 with CRT monitor, mouse and keyboard in south London, UK that I have been trying to give away for free for a while.
This thread may push me to try again.
Ask HN: Where to sell vintage computers?
41–48 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where to sell vintage computers?
#42I have a Sun Ultra 30 with CRT monitor, mouse and keyboard in south London, UK that I have been trying to give away for free for a while. This thread may push me to try again.
SPARC-era Sun workstations are my obsession.
The entire trajectory of my life was changed when I was plopped down in front of a SparcStation 5 with no CLI experience other than getting games to run in DOS and told to "figure it out".
Alas, I am in the US.
Re: Ask HN: Where to sell vintage computers?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody is fabbing more of the custom silicon you're going to find in non-PC vintage computers. There are FPGA-based replacements for some custom chips of yore, but there won't be any more real SID, POKEY, etc, chips.
I think people would buy a new motherboard with ISA and AGP slots even today. I still have old pieces that can make a complete system, just not the motherboard because they all died.
Someone figured out how to get ISA slots on Broadwell-era motherboards by highjacking the TPM port.
Re: Ask HN: Where to sell vintage computers?
#44I’ve often wondered: what do vintage computer users actually do with their vintage computers? The old ones won’t have internet capabilities and were mostly for business settings, so do you just fire up Lotus123 and click around in a spreadsheet? Or do they just look cool on a shelf?
I use a Digital AlphaStation 200 4/233 from 1995 running Digital UNIX as my home's GPS-disciplined NTP server.
In the corner of my home office is a Power Macintosh 6100/66 from 1994 whose sole purpose is to be my Sim City 2000 machine.
Whenever I feel the urge to generate some 24-bit color Mandelbrot fractals extremely slowly I have an HP 9000 712/100 (1994) workstation running NeXTStep 3.3 I can use.
I have a Sun Enterprise/Ultra 450 (1997) that I use as an end table. It started out as a midrange Enterprise that I upgraded the hell out of into a high-end Ultra configuration before realizing that drawing 800W at idle was no way to go through life.
You can probably tell when I started getting into computers.
Re: Ask HN: Where to sell vintage computers?
#45I’ve often wondered: what do vintage computer users actually do with their vintage computers? The old ones won’t have internet capabilities and were mostly for business settings, so do you just fire up Lotus123 and click around in a spreadsheet? Or do they just look cool on a shelf?
Most will carefully pack and store them, use them for exhibition/decoration, or as a speculative item. The lucky devices live in museums, regularly maintained and working.
The unlucky ones are seldomly used, as that would degrade them, hurting their speculative value. Even if you genuinely love them and use them to play or compute, they have little practical usefulness today unless you mod them with modern components, which again hurts their vintage value.
Re: Ask HN: Where to sell vintage computers?
#46I’ve often wondered: what do vintage computer users actually do with their vintage computers? The old ones won’t have internet capabilities and were mostly for business settings, so do you just fire up Lotus123 and click around in a spreadsheet? Or do they just look cool on a shelf?
Running on the original hardware is a different experience than using an emulator. Also, you can test if your emulator is correct. The old ones can have internet! They were mostly for playing games. There was far more software than Lotus123. They look cool on a desk powered on. For instance, I have llamafile piping output to the Apple II.
I often miss the HDD noise/light grinding away mid game. But I suppose that that is the type of thing that causes hds to die
Re: Ask HN: Where to sell vintage computers?
#47There’s a pretty big gap between early Apple computers and the crap most people have in their attic. Honestly, you’ll probably be disappointed by how much time it takes and how little money your junk is worth. Just throw it away. Or insist it has value and let your family deal with it after you die. That’s my dads plan.
Posting it for free / on curb on Craigslist is pretty easy and keeps it out of the waste stream.
No, it just makes you feel good that you’re not the one contributing to the “waste stream.” But spoiler alert, you still are!
Re: Ask HN: Where to sell vintage computers?
#48There’s a pretty big gap between early Apple computers and the crap most people have in their attic. Honestly, you’ll probably be disappointed by how much time it takes and how little money your junk is worth. Just throw it away. Or insist it has value and let your family deal with it after you die. That’s my dads plan.
> Just throw it away. At the very least, offer it up for free before throwing it away. They're not making any more vintage computers.
> They're not making any more vintage computers
Ah because they’re in such high demand and so useful that they stopped making them.