TrashPanda wrote on 2022-01-16, 06:04:
Sat back and watched an Auction for a 386 machine go for a whopping $400 AUD ...thats just the box, no cables, monitor, paperwork or accessories. Saw nothing particularly special about it either, 4mb of ram and a 10meg HDD that was just a nasty Maxtor IDE with a rather common 386SX in it.
I really dont get the stupid prices junk is selling for, especially junk as common as cockroaches, its only saving grace was a working 5.25 drive in it but that alone isn't worth 400 dollars.
The simple presumption is that, if such period hardware in viable condition is common, then ordinary market forces would flood the market with this so-called common junk, and prices would fall. There is no shortage of desperate people out there, who would instantly leap at the opportunity to turn junk into good money.
The very fact that isn't happening, is the best proof we currently have that such period hardware in viable condition is, in fact, not common at all. Anecdotal handfuls of the stuff scattered here and there is mere tiny peanuts, at the scale of humanity's 8 billion.
I can go into my local PC recycler right now, and their current regular throughput involves literal shelves and shelves full of dozens if not hundreds of HP/Dell/etc 2000's and 2010's generic black boxes... and along with that, at most a mere handful of pre-Pentium PCs, if even that.
Comes a point with every limited production in history, and in this case especially, with the computer industry being so comparatively tiny pre-1995 - that a couple/few decades after production ceases, most of the product has been used, stored (for a limited time), (then eventually) thrown out, trashed, gone.
Supporter of PicoGUS, PicoMEM, mt32-pi, WavetablePi, Throttle Blaster, Voltage Blaster, GBS-Control, GP2040-CE, RetroNAS.
