Dell "Oldest PC" winner on zdnet

From: SUPRDAVE_at_aol.com <(SUPRDAVE_at_aol.com)>
Date: Sat Aug 21 22:00:55 1999

In a message dated 8/21/99 9:51:14 PM US Eastern Standard Time,
aknight_at_mindspring.com writes:

> In spite of the pros/cons about the lawyer who turned
> over his Altair for a WinPC, one good thing (I think)
> that came out of this contest is publicity/awareness regarding
> the preservation of classics. Case in point is that
> when I got home last night and finally had a chance to
> read yesterday's local paper, in the business section there was
> an article about the Dell contest and the museum, including a photo
> of one of the curator (David Weil) trying to bring up a Commodore PET.
> While I wasn't surprised to hear about the contest & museum
> on the 'net, I was quite surprised to read about it in a
> local paper here in central North Carolina (right there next
> to the news about Red Hat). It was an Associated Press article,
> so it is bound to have appeared in other papers nationwide.
>
> FWIW, the article says that the museum has 200 "pieces", including
> a 360 mainframe, "the KIM Homebrew computer, a kit which sold for
> $25 ..." (I wonder if they dropped a zero), and a "Royal
> Precision Vacuum Tube Computer" - described as being built in
> 1963, with 113 vacuum tubes (sounds like a small number to me),
> drom memory, disk, & paper tape reader. The article also said
> there was some kind of storage disk from 1965 that was the
> size of a tractor-trailer tire, holding 2.5 Mbytes, and had
> to be sandblasted to be erased. (Huh???).
>
> Anyhow, this kind of awareness is a good thing, IMO.
>

well, awareness of old computers IS good, but like any hobby, once the
speculators get involved, it's not a hobby anymore. eventually (and
unfortunately) once the general populace mistakenly thinks that ANY old
computer is worth hundreds or thousands of dollars it will be hard to find
anything collectable cheaply. i'm trying to get a complete mac plus with the
original boxes from my neighbor, but she's got that mindset and probably wont
sell it for any realistic price although i try to downplay any investment
value in computers.
Received on Sat Aug 21 1999 - 22:00:55 BST