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Thread: Vintage Hardware Question

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    Forum Master JaBek1's Avatar
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    Default Vintage Hardware Question

    Just curious! Is there a collectors market for real old computer hardware? I'm talking stuff like original IBM 286's, 20 mega byte hard cards, 5¼" floppy drives and the like.
    Dennis

  2. #2

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    If there is I have some of these bits
    Ken

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    Well! In a few hundred years they may be popular at flea markets and antique fairs. And in a few thousand years archeologists will puzzle over what they were used for.

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    Forum Diehard heatemyfather's Avatar
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    For antiquity display and curiosity purposes only, as these were not particularly good even in their day and were soon forgotten when better technology replaced them.

    There may be the odd legacy system out there still running on such hardware though so who knows, your 5 1/4 drive may be worth a small fortune to the right person!
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  5. #5

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    Not really any market for the old stuff. The cables are different internally, so you can't easily hook up, for instance, a 5 1/4 floppy in a 5 year old computer. Occasionally someone makes a fish tank or terrarium out of an old monitor, but mostly the 286s etc get sent to the scrap heap. Too slow to even get on the internet, hard drives too small for anything.

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    Forum Diehard banrigh's Avatar
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    Jabek..get some glue and create a piece of modern art. Then sell it as a limited edition.

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    Forum Saint astral276's Avatar
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    I have tons of stuff up in the attic. I could probably start my own museum. Only worth chucking out I suppose but just can't bring myself to do it when I think what they cost at the time.

    The only one that may be worth good money is the hand built NASCOM 2 which seems to sell for good prices.


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    Hi, there is a market for ZX81's, Spectrum's, BBC's, C64, Dragon 32 and the like, don't think there's much going on in the IBM and IBM clone 286 department. Also some of the old storage media (pre 5 1/4" floppy).

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    Forum Master JaBek1's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by banrigh View Post
    Jabek..get some glue and create a piece of modern art. Then sell it as a limited edition.
    Actually, that sounds like a good idea.

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    Forum Master gazlannathai's Avatar
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    286's and 386's (especially 386 DX) make excellent printer servers on LANs, even with HDDs as small as 20MB - just set them up with DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 (strip Win to the bone though - kill all the games, screen savers and stuff), they're also good for building fax-modem farms.

    The beauty of those old systems is the number of ISA and IDE slots on the mainboard - 8 slots = 8 fax-modems (and yes, they'll run 56K internal cards if you can get the drivers). Fax marketing still enjoys a far higher customer action rate than email.

    You can also use those slots to support multiple parallel cards for print serving to a range of printers for different purposes.

    Another use for them is as quarantine systems for pre-scanning CDs and floppies for viruses before using them on your LAN

    There's loads of life left in those old systems yet, including as processors in Computer Aided Manufacturing (robot control).

    However, the best use overall is via the various charities that supply old, outdated systems free of charge to some of the poorest parts of Africa - Google will help you find those.

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