I myself have a fairly large house (no basements
around here tho, waah, waah) but a much smaller "wife
approved" geek area. So, I've been interested in
collecting only small items of very high quality from
technical, historical, and appearance points of view.
I also want to display mostly working equipment, so
non-working or "beat" equipment that there is no hope
of repairing/restoring is of almost no interest to me.
I've passed on a lot of stuff I have some regrets
about, but then I had more to spend on what I really
want.
I think that every mature "collectible industry"
causes specialization amongst collectors. This
collectible, being immature and very small, hasn't
forced any specialization yet. But the day may come
when you might want to specialize, and are missing
some stuff, and someone else wants to specialize in
something in which you have no interest, and then
trading is possible. For example, the rarest prototype
Commodore computer in the world purchased for $1.00 at
Goodwill wouldn't interest me at all - but if I had
it, I'd sell/trade it in a heartbeat with no regrets
for other stuff that might be of much less "eBay"
value. Someone paid me $200 for an unused Intel C8080B
chip. I spent that money on a broken paper tape punch
and a tiny motorized DATA I/O paper tape reader(both
of which I reverse engineered/repaired and am
extremely happy with). I think I got a good deal, and
I know he does - in his specialty, he told me that the
chip was the only gold/ceramic 8080B that anyone had
ever seen.
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Received on Tue Feb 05 2002 - 15:35:57 GMT