Classic computer collecting is rewarding on so many levels. And in so many
senses, we have a collector community relationship that rivals those of much
more established hobbies. That's why it's so important, as the hobby begins
to reach maturity, that we not lose sight of our fundamentals.
Lately, there has been a disturbing trend towards isolationism and elitism
among our flock, up to and including outright hostility. This has got to
stop.
Now, as Dennis Miller says, I don't want to get off on a rant here. As much
as anyone else, I'd like a world full of retired aerospace engineers with
garages full of free Altairs. I'd also like the IRS to abolish my income
taxes and give me a free Ferrari. It's just not going to work that way,
folks.
Lashing out at people who want to publicize our hobby is like sitting in the
nosebleed section of your hometown baseball stadium and hoping to god that
your team loses big so you can afford better tickets next year. Get OVER
it. Nobody understands our hobby, it's next to impossible to properly
insure, there's far too little real museum space devoted to classic
computers, hundreds of historic pieces are being tossed in the dumpster
every day, and you want to keep the whole thing a big in-clique secret.
Does this make any freaking sense to you?
Every time I hear somebody say something like, "Are you going to sell that
to a REAL collector at a decent price or are you going to WHORE it on EBAY?"
I just want to gag. Amazing as this may seem, the people on eBay deserve
this stuff as much as you do, mr. nose-in-the-air elitist. Oh sure, who
wouldn't want to buy the thing at a token "collector price" and save a bunch
of money, but don't make the seller feel like an ass because he wants to
participate in a free-market economy.
And quit calling the people on eBay "morons". OK, sure, the guy who bid
$510 for the "signature Macintosh" was a few cans short of a six-pack, but
if you bothered to follow up on the auction, you'd notice that most of the
bidders pulled out once they caught a clue. And everybody who pays what YOU
consider a high price for a genuinely interesting piece of hardware is not
an idiot. People pay money for something because they want it. So, you're
basically upset that somebody wants it more than you do?
And while we're at it, what's with all this "some rich bastard overbid me"
crap. If I went through all the classiccmp posts about rich executives,
rich internet IPO participants, rich employees of big computer companies,
and replaced all the occurrences of "rich" with "black" or "hispanic", the
vintage computer festival would look like a Klan rally. America has always
stood for a place where anybody can get rich if they work hard enough. Are
you upset that somebody else got there first? There is a lot of assumption
that, when someone pays a high price for a classic computer, that they A)
don't know as much about it as you do, and B) don't care as much about it as
you do, when the reverse is probably the case. Look, just because you
refused that job opportunity at Apple in 1983 because you thought the Lisa
was a bomb and your business selling print drivers for daisywheels was doing
so well, DOESN'T mean you're an idealist.
Because somebody outbid you doesn't mean they deserve it less than you do.
Maybe they have more cash, maybe they were just willing to bid a higher
perecentage of their income than you were. Heck, somebody with cash
probably is going to care for the item better. A good percentage of the
purported idealists complaining about high classic computer prices have an
Altair on their kitchen table with coffee mug rings on the top. Look, I'm
impressed that you're reading this post through a custom TCP/IP stack that
you wrote for a Kaypro II. If you did that for the fun of it, more power to
you. If you think that doing your daily correspondence on a dot matrix
printer makes you a better classic computer collector than the rest of us,
that's something else. It's like that guy who coated the entire exterior of
his 1952 Oldsmobile with tiny rhinestones over a grueling 5-year period --
impressive, but the man obviously had too much time on his hands. It is NOT
necessary to have a Wozniak beard, live in a geodesic dome house, and drive
a Volkswagen Thing to appreciate classic computers.
Wake up, open up, embrace the world's coming to know our hobby. Because
otherwise, one day you're going to wake up and find that not a single
schoolchildren remembers any of this history, because somebody started
making 6800 assembler coding an entrance requirement to the museums.
Kai
Received on Wed Jun 30 1999 - 12:20:38 BST
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