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Your best and worst vintage computer investments?

VERAULT said:
Yeah, these things are like buying a boat or swimming pool. Even if its "free" you end up putting money into them, its impossible not to. So they are all bad investments unless you can sell them all at high profits.
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Boats? Bought my Shark 24 for a cool $3K sold for $200 couple of years later. :);):);)
 
My worst was a Tandy PC-4 pocket computer I bought off of eBay as NIB. I paid more than I should have and it never worked right. My attempts at fixing it merely blew it up worse.
 
NeXT said:
I asked that question to twitter (that's about as broad of a range of a community as I can access) late last year and aside from two programs I could find *nobody* who had used an Apple I in recent history to do anything beyond the ROM monitor or display a picture of Steve Jobs/Woz.
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The only reason the Apple-1 is so prominent as a collectors item (and as a target for replica builders) is because it's the "first Apple computer" and, well, we know how people venerate the company. It has almost nothing to recommend it on its own merits. Discussing it frankly makes me twitchy because its technical/historical significance is so grossly overblown.

(Even when you're talking about Apple; the Apple II was the product that really mattered, and it's also the one where you can at least make a technical case for it being an "innovative" product. Woz himself makes it crystal clear that he was bored with the Apple-1 before he even really finished it. Which makes it especially irksome how some falsehoods about it, such as its timing relative to other pioneer computers, are repeated/amplified in his own autobiography in a way that comes across an awful lot like ego stroking.)

But, hey, I'm not here to yuck other people's yum or whatever. Or at least not to excess.

NeXT said:
This seems to be the case for a lot of the really early single board micros before things got fancy enough to ship with a case. I find it hard to believe most of these systems sold on curiosity alone and there was simply never any software.
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It's worth remembering just how few units the Apple I sold, only a fraction of the units of a lot of other DIY computers, and it was strangled in the cradle before it could ever grow into a "real computer" with third party peripherals/disk drives/whatever. (Not that its severe console limitations and whatnot would have ever really allowed that.) It's not surprising that its software base is... sparse.
 
alpher said:
Boats? Bought my Shark 24 for a cool $3K sold for $200 couple of years later. :);):);)
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point proven. Anyway my wife made me sell my all alluminum bass boat before i could even stsrt rebuilding it.. so my time as a boat owner was barely noticeable and a financial loss.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Very good AO.


Boat anchor maybe ;)
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Ah yes, reminds me of an old thread I encountered on another site where a guy's Compudyne 386 broke and someone suggested using it as a boat anchor. Understandably wouldn't go over well with this forum these days, or even back then I'd imagine. NOW if my Samsung Galaxy A02s was heavy enough to use as a boat anchor I would be completely fine using it as one, that piece of sh*t phone frustrates the hell out of me ;)
 
I never seen myself investing or loosing money, unless I do something stupid, which I have a few times. Point and take... I have a clamshell g3 laptop. Purchased one those cheap ac adapters, since an original was going for 60+ dollars, for I dunno 20 or so. Anyways it was way cheaper, the price isn't the point.

Point is I purchased the adapter, got the machine running, and put it away. Fast forward 2 years till last month. Plugged it in, forgot you have to INSTALL THE POWER ADAPTER FIRST OR IT SELF DESTRUCTS. Think I used it maybe 4 times tops. Its now dead, awaiting me to either A, dremel/hot knife it open and repair it, or B, get the real deal which I should have to begin with. So there went 20-30 bucks. I guess that was a bad investment? Is it an amount of money that I couldn't afford to loose, no. But it was a bad investment. Wish I have put a label on the power brick. Now I have to spend more money to buy yet another power adapter, because I will not tolerate machines I cannot test or power up. I refuse to let them be shelf queens...

Not sure if that was your original intentions on the post, but was my interpretation.

As hobbyists I think ALL US have purchased a thing or two that sucked monkey nuts, was dubious quality, or flat out did not meet expectations and felt ripped off. I'm hoping that's the intention of this thread.
 
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Oh you dont need to justify it to me.. Im just jealous. My days of being able to drink and eat whatever I want, whenever I want... Are sadly past.

Cant even enjoy a black cofee, its got almond milk in it. Youth is wasted on the young.
 
Probably my worst investments (in terms of money) are the stuff I got for free or very low value, but threw out years ago. Even stuff like clone MDA monitors, had like 20 of them, they now are worth a bit. It's sad when I see stuff that I now want but threw away. I once sold 10 486 PCI motherboards on eBay and got 10GBP for the lot. It's not really about the money for me, it's if I had that money, I could buy more interesting stuff at the crazy eBay prices. Most of the stuff I want now is very specific so eBay is like the only place.
 
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