Price guide for vintage computers

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Fri Oct 26 08:45:56 2001

At 12:36 AM 10/26/01 -0400, Glen Goodwin wrote:
>For vintage computers, a price guide published 2-4 times yearly, listing
>maybe 500 computers, might work. It could be advantageous to only include
>photos for 50 of these computers in each issue, rotating through all 500.
>This would encourage people to buy the next issue, with photos of 50
>*different* machines.

I'd be very surprised if the "classic computer collector" market
is large enough to support anyone publishing such a guide.

What you describe would be a lot of work, even if you published
on CD-R or web site instead of paper or enacted other
capital-saving measures.

To give a little praise where it's due, I'm sure Sellam could
tell stories about the tremendous amount of work involved in putting
on a convention like VCF.

But consider there's still at least one annual Amiga-oriented show,
and it appears to draw at least as many if not more attendees
and paying exhibitors as a VCF. Talk about dead markets...
My software company's Amiga versions hung on far longer than made
any sense, yet the Amiga versions were discontinued at least six
years ago, and they're still sending me flyers describing their
conventions.

And although eBay appears to be doing nothing with all that
pricing information of all their past auctions, you never know.
Maybe they have a splinter company under another name that's
already selling the data. Maybe they're saving it all onto endless
piles of DLTs and they'll massage it someday. Or maybe
it's all falling into the bit bucket - who knows. If they're
saving it, I wonder if they were smart enough to cache the
externally hosted images.

On the other hand, I bet that if you published a price guide
in any market and directly noted that you derived your price
info from eBay auctions, they'd smack you with legal paper
urging you to cease and desist from mining their property
without permission.

- John
Received on Fri Oct 26 2001 - 08:45:56 BST

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