Interesting, how can you tell prices are falling on 70-80s gear? Any statistics?

I have a feeling that also 90s stuff is becoming less interesting. But it's hard to tell objectively, might just be me loosing interest.

Might be possible to get statistics on very common items? Rare items selling for a-lot-of-money is more like chance.

I would personally say that games peaked right before the introduction of the "let's make it 3d" mentality in the gaming industry. We had kind of a dark age then.

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-10-14, 17:19:

A Lot of People assume that they lived through the golden age of computing and to them, that golden age is slightly different from the others.

I think the golden age is a little different than what is inherently collectible or what people may be nostalgic about, but... to me, the 'golden age' of desktop personal computers is easy to identify. At least when it comes to hardware. 1994-2006.

And the reason I pick that as the golden age is because of just the sheer amount of innovation in that time period. 1994, you might have a P90 with a 1-2 meg video card, 8 megs of RAM, 17" CRT, SB16, DOS/Win 3.1 if you were insanely lucky and had a huge budget. If you had less of a budget, you barely got a 486 with 4 megs, a 14" CRT, 250-400 meg HD, etc. And... most of these computers were half-obsolete by the time you took them home, you need more RAM 6-12 months later, etc.

By 2006, you're looking at a C2D or early C2Q, 2.4GHz, a graphics card with more memory than you care about for 2D purposes (no one remembers the days when video memory limited your ability to drive a CRT bigger than 15"), 2 gigs of RAM, Vista (almost) or XP (operating systems of insane reliability compared to DOS/Win3.1), a 1920x1200 24" LCD, crazy funky sound cards like the SB X-Fi, etc.

And then after 2006, everything started fizzling. The failure of Vista meant that no one developed software that needed new hardware. Nicer peripherals such as sound cards started falling off the market. Entire categories of peripherals like, say, removable storage, just vanished. The C2D/C2Q remained viable for most things for dramatically longer than any processor in this golden age... and indeed, are still somewhatish viable today.

I would further add one more milestone - fall 2008. The release of Google Chrome, which supercharged a trend to treat 'the web' as the platform for most non-gaming software development.

I would guess that most people who lived through that generation gradually lost their interest in computers, simply because... nothing was exciting and new anymore. 'New' tended to mean ever cost-reduced laptops, not fancy high-end desktops.

The other thing I would note is all the different things computers became able to do between 1994-2006:
- music. You couldn't play half-reasonable music on a 486 except straight off a CD;
- photography. In 1994, "digital" photography meant scanning film negatives in some expensive scanner and needing some kind of expensive storage solution to store more than a few such scans; by the early 2000s, you had ubiquitous digital cameras and computers able to deal with those photos.
- cheap printing - the price of printers, especially laser ones, just plunged
- and, of course, always-on Internet connectivity outside big huge organizations

The flip side is that, especially for parents, this was an expensive, expensive 12 years. Most people probably would have needed 4 computers in that time period, plus various upgrades here and there (more RAM, always more RAM, ideally more storage, etc).

My collection is locked. And really do not have interest for more. Have few 486. And alot Pentium/MMX/2/3/Celeron machines for my DOS needs. Few hundred 1.44MB floppies. Most stuff I got and collected when it did not had much retro status and more recycle bin status. Also some CD and DVD blanks. If my stuff just not start to massively die off, I have decades of fun ahead.

Had a Amiga, Commodore 64, CGA 286, few 386 computers. They were cumbersome, slow, little faulty. My golden age is the Doom age so 486+.

Joakim wrote on 2024-10-14, 17:36:

Interesting, how can you tell prices are falling on 70-80s gear? Any statistics? […]
Show full quote

Interesting, how can you tell prices are falling on 70-80s gear? Any statistics?

I have a feeling that also 90s stuff is becoming less interesting. But it's hard to tell objectively, might just be me loosing interest.

Might be possible to get statistics on very common items? Rare items selling for a-lot-of-money is more like chance.

I would personally say that games peaked right before the introduction of the "let's make it 3d" mentality in the gaming industry. We had kind of a dark age then.

I don't have any data at all for 70's to early 80's stuff, I just don't have the knowledge required to even know what is what, it was a little before my time.

Good point on the common items, I bet I could find some data on internet archiving sites of lets say Pentium III & 486 Prices ect ect, over the last 5 year, and chart it!
This would help give a deeper understanding, that just my "feelings" on the matter 😁

I also think the retiring of the "Plain old telephone system" [POTS] had a profound effect on certain groups of retro enthusiasts. Its very difficult to get true Copper lines to ones residence anymore. Rendering a lot of early Networking obsolete without emulation.

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-10-14, 18:12:

Good point on the common items, I bet I could find some data on internet archiving sites of lets say Pentium III & 486 Prices ect ect, over the last 5 year, and chart it!
This would help give a deeper understanding, that just my "feelings" on the matter 😁

Well, there are some indicia out there, e.g. was it... 5?... years ago that the legendary Asrock 45nm-C2-friendly i865 board was still available brand new. And now they're unobtainium.

My own sense is that i) the pandemic, and ii) YouTube combined to introduce way way more nostalgic/collecting-minded people to the idea of vintage computers.

And when I say YouTube, I think there are two different kinds of YouTubers:
1) the retro-only people like Phil's Computer Lab, Action Retro, LGR, etc, and
2) the people who traditionally did modern stuff but who have dabbed in retro in the last couple of years. I'm thinking here of Luke Miani playing with a PowerBook G4 titanium, the YouTuber who took a 128K Mac to an Apple store (there may have actually been multiple?), I think Linus Tech Tips did something with an early 2000s retro system a few months ago, etc.

I suspect what happens is that YouTubers in the #2 category get people vaguely curious, they do a search or two, some YouTubers in the first category turn up, they watch a few videos, YouTube bombards them with way more, and next thing you know, they're here or other similar places planning their own retro projects.

And sometimes you see people who are just like, behind the times, e.g. people wanting Voodoos or Mac Color Classics with Mystic mods or Power Mac G4 cubes who are surprised that those things are not... barely-above-e-waste-priced anymore. And in a way I get it - they could easily be watching/reading 5-10 year old stuff, and... oops, every other collector already beat them to these things.

VivienM wrote on 2024-10-14, 17:46:

I think the golden age is a little different than what is inherently collectible or what people may be nostalgic about, but... to me, the 'golden age' of desktop personal computers is easy to identify. At least when it comes to hardware. 1994-2006.

This will definitely vary depending on one's own experiences. Ask an Amiga fan and they'd probably define the golden age of computing as mid-to-late 80's.

I suggest 1998 as a year that sparked a golden age for desktops with the introduction of the iMac. It helped make home computers even more mainstream and getting a lot of people online who might previously have not.

I would also argue 2001 specifically for Windows PCs with the introduction of XP and bringing a much more stable OS to that platform. The Win 9x period was a dark age for Windows desktop PCs in my opinion. It still boggles my mind that re-installing Win9x every 6 to 12 months was accepted practice due to how to cluttered and unstable those OS's got.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-10-14, 19:08:

I would also argue 2001 specifically for Windows PCs with the introduction of XP and bringing a much more stable OS to that platform. The Win 9x period was a dark age for Windows desktop PCs in my opinion. It still boggles my mind that re-installing Win9x every 6 to 12 months was accepted practice due to how to cluttered and unstable those OS's got.

Look, by mid-2000, I was more than done with 98SE and it running out of system resources and requiring crazy frequent reboots.

But I think you have to look at the historical context. Win95/98/98SE gave the PC platform the following:
- a friendly GUI that compared positively to the Mac's for the first time (Program Manager/File Manager/etc in 3.x just didn't cut it)
- TCP/IP networking, including dial-up TCP/IP networking (dialup on Win3.x required Trumpet Winsock or similar), enabling a random person to connect to the Internet from home
- plug and play, much better hardware/driver/etc support
- the end of DOS with its quirks, e.g. how each program needed its own printer drivers, how each program had its own sound support, etc, in favour of software that interacted with common APIs (and yes, Win3.1 gave you that too to some extent, but there was still a lot of pure DOS floating around in 1994)
- much more reliability than DOS/Win3.x/classic Mac OS. Not enough reliability, especially by the end, but a lot more.
- forward compatibility for 32-bit software, i.e. almost all 32-bit software for Win9x would run on NT
- the beginning of USB on the PC platform (USB wouldn't come to NT until Win2000), which marked the beginning of the end of 'oh you want to add thingy X? open up your machine and put in an ISA card' or ugly, ugly hacks like parallel port scanners/zip drives/etc.
- multiple monitor support (that's one that everybody forgets about, but while Macs had multi-monitor support in 1987, it would only come to the PC world with Win98)
... at a price tag of thousands of dollars less than NT-capable hardware. I would have loved to have run NT 4 or NT 3.51 but I... basically... could not afford the hardware, in particular the RAM.

Really, the Win9x family is the OS family that took the PC from a scary high-learning curve OMG-config.sys-file-huh-what world to something the average person could buy at a non-specialized retailer, get online, and have their first malware infestation.

I do sort of have a soft spot for the 16-Bit era which took place in early to mid-90s (roughly).
Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis/MegaDrive, Windows 3.1, OS/2, 486 PCs, fractals, 2D graphics (sprite art), early multimedia (CD-i, Video CD, Photo CD).
That was a time that was very experimental. Early Virtual Reality (VR) with cyber helmets (VFX-1) and 3D glasses. Cyberspace. POV Ray.

Windows 95 was sort of a transitional phase, I think. 16-Bit hard and software had been modified to work in a 32-Bit world.
A lot of Windows 3.1 stuff could utilize extended features of Windows 95, while remaining compatible to Windows 3.1x (WinG API etc).
The 90s humor was still there when Windows 95 RTM was around (1995/1996). World was pre-DirectX, still, pretty much.
Experimental graphics hardware like Nvidia NV1 brought fresh concepts.
The internet was here to stay, but classic online services and BBSes were still around, too.

Then the late 90s came and started to look pale, I think. Everything had to be 3D rendered and seemed loveless to me.
It was as if hand-drawn animation had been replaced by bad CGI.
The previous years looked like a distant dream, somehow. I felt depressed.

The Playstation and the N64 and their game libraries sealed the coffin to me.
That wasn't my world anymore. Shooters and sports games everywhere, or so it felt. No more carefree, inoccent fun.
To give an impression, the Super Nintendo and Genesis platforms had felt pretty much like Amiga platform with its 2D games.
I think my feelings about the situation were same as the feelings of the Amiga people when they realized the "party was over".

Then followed popular games like Tomb Raider, Unreal Turnament and Counterstrike. And Warcraft.
- I do admit I didn't completely follow the development at the time anymore.

Windows 98SE.. The OS with the tomb stone GUI. I think I do associate Windows 98SE with the turn of the millenium.
Visiting strange websites with HTML/frames/animated GIFs with Internet Exlorer 5.x, ICQ5,
experimental 3D multimedia things like Chronicles of Jaruu Tenk or Fin Fin (from 1996 actually),
Visual Basic 6, weird desktop games like Moorhuhn (aka Crazy Chicken) and Sven Bømwøllen..

Windows XP then raised my hope again. In early 2000s, indie games and sites such as Caiman.us were around.
There was a revival in colourful 2D graphics, with people making skins/themes for OSes and Winamp.
The Windows XP GUI (Luna) was very Teletubby like, I admit. But it had to in order to compete with Mac OS X's Aqua GUI.
The candy bar theme was popular on both sides, thus.

Vista. When Vista was Release Candidate (RC) phase, I was very excited.
I've even bought myself a GF5200 for Aero Glass. The polished, transparent GUI was very sci-fi like and optimistic.
Unfortunately, Vista had adoption problems when released and got a bad reputation.
I also didn't like the deeply integrated DRM and all the restrictions it imposed to multimedia.
It didn't help that my beloved XP software not seldomly had glitches on Vista.

Windows 7. It was okay, but the GUI was ugly in comparison to Vista.
The gap to XP's GUI had been becoming even bigger, too. The ribbon interface was ugly, I think.

Edit: I didn't mean to sound unfair against the late 90s and 3D age. I rather just wrote down how I felt at the time.
Years later I had learnt that PS1 and N64 had some lesser known gems, as well. Klonoa, Puchi Carat (PS1), Kirby 64, Mischief Makers (N64) etc. Just to name a few.
That's when I had come to terms with these platforms. I'm still struggling with FPS genre, though. I can't aim on people, no matter if real or virtual.

I also do have a bit of nostalgia for Windows 98SE, even. Mainly because of Visual Basic 6 and tinkering with electronics (vero boards, AVR Studio 4, LPT/COM ports, PIC16C84 MCUs).
Windows 9x allowed direct hardware access to i/o ports, which was nice for LPT port experiments. NT requires use of PortTalk driver to make it possible or applications using port.dll.
Things like game backup devices once relied on LPT port for PC-Link, too, and worked best on DOS or DOS-based Windows.: Super MagiCom, Super Magic Drive, XChanger, GB SmartDrive, e-merger etc.
Which in turn leads me to the young emulation scene of the day. The 90s and early 2000s started many of today's popular emulation projects..

Edit: I've forgot to mention something else. I had a few positive memories of late 90s/early 90s when buying shareware CDs ("shovelware CDs").
Places like Vobis or Saturn had sold shareware/freeware CDs and cheap re-releases of classics at the time, as well.

If memory serves, they had these jewel cases and DVD cases with 90s games at the "Software Pyramide",
which was a card board stand in pyramid shape that both was full of shareware CDs and "green pepper" line of re-releases.

Also popular in the region I was living were the various shareware CDs made by ARI and CDV Software.
They had contained the latest DOS and Windows 3.x/95 and NT games and applications at the time.
Plus MOD files and pictures. Always felt a bit like a Wundertüte (surprise bag). 😁

To me, this little oddity was important, because it was a continuation of the early-mid 90s to some sort. It gave me something to hold on to.
It was re-assuring that things like Commander Keen IV, Jazz Jackrabbit and other classic games were still being played by new players.

All in all, it was a bit like taking a break from the internet for a while. Just like using a pager instead of a cell phone from time to time (I owned a pager for Scall service).
I had bought such CDs in early 2000s from time to time for a about 5€, I think (in the 90s, I had paid 20DM on average).
- Just like I used to buy comics at a little kiosk. You know, such as Yps magazine, LTB books (aka Donald Duck pocket books) and various PC mags.

Edit: Last but not least, I remember watching then-new sci-fi shows like FarScape, Lexx – The Dark Zone, Andromeda and Enterprise.
And a weird series called Earth: Final Conflict. Which wasn't bad, actually. Just.. Strange?! But anyhow, that's how I had felt about Babylon 5, too, at one point. 😅

I was thinking similar thing on the weekend, playing NFS4 a game from 25 years ago and still looks pretty good IMHO
Then started thinking I couldn't imagine in 1999 playing a game from the mid 70's.
Does this mean late 90's early 2000's was the golden age at least for PC gaming? It's very much my "group" so have have a large bias.

I think your groups are about right.
I remember when I started here more people were building 486/SX and slower machines for earlier games.
These days it seems mid/late 90's is where most peoples interest begins.

Vogons isnt a good place to gauge the interest in non PC machines, so Amiga, Commadore, etc may be just as popular as ever but we'll never know on this forum.

I think the golden age of computing is different to golden age of games.
But if I had to choose I guess I'd say the XP era of mid 2000's?

I remember my mum said how my brother and his friends had a lan gaming session up and running within the first hour, where it took my group 1/2 a day with a mix of dos/win9x, TCP and IPX networking.
Also hardware became absolute way too quick early 2000's. Great for innovation but bad for us end users.

For those first few years we almost had a standard. Everyone was using the same OS (XP), Same browser (IE), had DSL internet but security hadn't become so important that it effected productivity.
but this perhaps went on for a bit too long and everything kind of grinded to a halt for a bit too long and XP's becoming easier to infect and IE no longer keeping up with modern web page's

1981-89 - ancient cga shit
1990-93 - vga sound blaster!!! pc is here!!! suck it amiga!!!!
1994 - 1999- welp, time to upgrade every year because 3d is also here. Every year there's a new standard
2000-2001 - y2k!!!!! peak dotcommery!!! mp3z!!!! 1ghz!!!! 'internet computers' in supermarkets!!! free ISPS!!!
2002- shaders are here, all your parts don't work anymore!!! also the capacitor plague begins and game boxes shrink in the US. also many suddenly learn that mhz is less meaningful
2003-2011 the disc drm hell days. thanks enlight/jowood/ea/sony. also maxtor/seagate bad drives. also the slow rise of dos emulation starts here because xp replaced 9x and everyones old things stopped working
2012-now - big non-beige computer cases!!! rgb lights!!! psus and drives now at the bottom so watercooling can leak and wreck everything!! gpus find new use for laundering and theft!!!

leileilol wrote on 2024-10-15, 02:04:

1981-89 - ancient cga shit 1990-93 - vga sound blaster!!! pc is here!!! suck it amiga!!!! 1994 - 1999- welp, time to upgrade eve […]
Show full quote

1981-89 - ancient cga shit
1990-93 - vga sound blaster!!! pc is here!!! suck it amiga!!!!
1994 - 1999- welp, time to upgrade every year because 3d is also here. Every year there's a new standard
2000-2001 - y2k!!!!! peak dotcommery!!! mp3z!!!! 1ghz!!!! 'internet computers' in supermarkets!!! free ISPS!!!
2002- shaders are here, all your parts don't work anymore!!! also the capacitor plague begins and game boxes shrink in the US. also many suddenly learn that mhz is less meaningful
2003-2011 the disc drm hell days. thanks enlight/jowood/ea/sony. also maxtor/seagate bad drives. also the slow rise of dos emulation starts here because xp replaced 9x and everyones old things stopped working
2012-now - big non-beige computer cases!!! rgb lights!!! psus and drives now at the bottom so watercooling can leak and wreck everything!! gpus find new use for laundering and theft!!!

What about PCJR and Tandy 1000s though , they had some okay hardware for the 1980s?

ok hardware doesn't always mean an ok user experience

I think the golden age is a little different than what is inherently collectible or what people may be nostalgic about, but... to me, the 'golden age' of desktop personal computers is easy to identify. At least when it comes to hardware. 1994-2006.

Interesting. I would argue that 1994 is actually the END of the golden age. And in a sense the advent of the FPS was the pinnacle but also the downfall responsible for that. By that time even the smallest studio would see the writing on the wall that the industry was changing and a huge mutual buyout scramble started. At the same time – (beside adding ever increasing 3D capabilities to your engine) most companies would only “polish” existing concepts. On the other hand, during the years before, genres were invented and most of the games of this time remain unique timeless classics which already hold 98% of the DNA of later iterations. Think of the following examples (not strictly limited to the PC):
- The adventure genre lead by Sierra and Lucas Arts with uncounted beautiful games (1998 - Grim Fandango (Swansong))
- The RTS genre led by Blizzard and Westwood (1992 - Dune II / 1993 Syndicate / 1994 Warcraft I)
- The Flight Sim genre (think 1990 Wing Commander / 1992 – Commanche / 1993 – X-Wing / 1999 – Freespace II – (Swansong))
- The Puzzle genre (think Lode Runner, Sokoban, Lemmings, Pushover, Incredible Machine, Humans, Lost Vikings). Sure, we have plenty of puzzle games these days, but they are so incredible stupid in comparison (yes Candy Crash)
- Tactical and 3D CRPGs (think Eye of the Beholder, Ultima games or the first Elder scrolls. Or just check how much Baldur’s gate owes to Pool of Radiance.)
- Everything Sid Meier worked on and other Sim games (think Pirates!, Theme Park, Transport tycoon, Railroad tycoon)
- Think Strategy games (Civilization, Battle Isle, the Settlers)
- Think City Builders (Sim City, Caesar, The Patrician)
- Think of crazy racing games like Lotus Turbo challenge (true Outrun feeling on your home PC), or Stunts
- Think of the unique spin platformers took on home PCs (think Turrican, GODS, Prince etc.)
- Think of a ton of unique games that don’t fit any genre or cross boundaries (think Micromachines, Quest for Glory, HOMM)

To me it seems that game developers up to around the mid 90’s were boiling over from creative ideas and completely running wild with a freedom to experiment and mix and match their artistic with their coding skills. After that, many of these brilliant ideas became the “endless sequel” treatment until the genre died. Im not saying that there were no good games during that time, but some of that early magic was lost (ok – maybe I AM nostalgic).

Aui wrote on 2024-10-15, 03:19:

To me it seems that game developers up to around the mid 90’s were boiling over from creative ideas and completely running wild with a freedom to experiment and mix and match their artistic with their coding skills.
After that, many of these brilliant ideas became the “endless sequel” treatment until the genre died. Im not saying that there were no good games during that time, but some of that early magic was lost (ok – maybe I AM nostalgic).

I really loved that dynamic atmosphere of the time, even though I had missed out a lot! The staff at magazines in general was equally silly at the time, I think! But in a good way! 🤣
For example, I remember watching the PC Player Magazin videos that they had on cover disk (CD). It were AVI files, essentially (Video for Windows).
Here's an example. It's about mating seasons of PC soundcards and other funny stuff. I really miss that kind of wacky humor! 🥲

Edit: What I miss about the 90s was this relaxed and casual attitude, maybe.
Everyone wasn't being too serious or obsessed about a certain matter.
Game and application developers added easter eggs and other jokes..

In the 2000s, I felt that this was vanishing somehow. People got angry sooner, worshipped their favorite platform/genre etc.
And then, increased censorship etc. It felt like was like 1980s all over again, in terms of restrictions. In my country, at least.

Before that, by the mid-90s, games and media had been allowed a certain amount of, um, 'lewdness' or generosity.
There was an amount of freedom that was challenging the social norms, I mean.

Games like Normality, Sam&Max, Bazooka Sue, Larry series or Spellcasting series come to mind.
Or animated shows like Animaniacs or Tiny Toons, which not seldomly crossed the limits of good taste.
Or these, uh, various erotic CD-ROMs with their "interactive" games (not my genre, but I remember it being "a thing" in software catalogs)..

All in all, this "going back" to socially safe standards had felt as if something like the western culture revolution of late 60s and 70s had been undone.
It felt like a downgrade. The technology had improved, but the society?

I mean, okay, the 90s weren't all rainbows and sunshine, either.
There were flamewars on usenet in the 90s before and Amiga users were rantung on PCs in magazines, but that was nerd territory rather than real life..

There was no or much lesser finger pointing, either, from what I remember.
In the 1980s and 1990s, teens and twens had worked in game development, as well.
And they being just themselves had added little easter eggs here and there.

So it happened that for example, that cheat code for The Apprentice on CD-i came to be, which would unlock some pixel sprites of sexy manga girls.
Or that little nsfw hack for Atari ST game Dyanmite Dux that showed an alternate intro..

Harmless by 90s standard, boys were just being boys here. They had no bad intentions and didn't treat females badly, either.
They were simply developing, had to cope with puberty, maybe. Girls matured earlier here (but also had same topics in head, sigh).
But by 21th century standards it's an affront, the critics are upset, talk about s*xism etc. No tolerance or insight to the citcumstances.

Same happened with a review of Snatcher (80s sci-fi, cyberpunk game), that I had read a few months ago.
It was written by a woman, apparently. She liked the game, but was disappointed by the amount of misogyny in the game.
Which maybe isn't wrong, but it was way below the norm of what other Japanese games had to offer at the time (if you know about PC-98 platform you see).

In my opinion, the choice of picking up a bra or checking the shower or to call number of an erotic hotline was meant to give players some freedom of choice, to also allow bad choices and see what happens.
That the game didn't reward bad choices, but rather the contrary, wasn't being recognized here, I think.

That's what also happened in most 90s games, I think. That "Die goldene Mähne des Samson" comes to mind, an mid-90s ad game for a cigarrete maker (sfw).
You have the choice to approach a woman in a macho style, but then you're being paid back in further dialoges. Larry style, if you will. This often leads to humorous and snarky dialoges.

Anyway. Sorry for going a bit off-topic here. I did so to give an idea how the 90s differed, from my point of view.
It wasn't perfect, but you had an atmosphere that was more uplifting, more positive. And humor was being used to de-escalate a situation, still (my dad's jokes are almost criminal by today's standard).
If you have doubts, just have a look at shows like ST:TNG and ST:VOY. 😀
They imagined a bright future were people would want to be and live in.

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-10-14, 17:19:

Early 70's to very early 80's, -- I don't have much knowledge in this area, not even enough to gauge interest. For 80's to early […]
Show full quote

Early 70's to very early 80's, -- I don't have much knowledge in this area, not even enough to gauge interest.
For 80's to early 90's PC's / Components -- Peak interest has already passed because prices are falling?
For Late 90's to early 2000's -- Is currently in Peak interest/Prices Lots of people chasing the same products.
Late 00's -- Are just starting to heat up, but interest may be building fast.
Early 2010 -- infancy still to0 recent.

I think it may be affected by all kinds of things, but as a general rule the rarity is a function of production volumes at the time and proportion kept in circulation

for computers the proportion in circulation is low, its not uncommon to see huge volumes of working computers being offloaded to e-waste, some fairly recent

in any case the pre 90's stuff tends to be more specialist and less PC oriented, including 8 and 16 bit computers - think Amiga, home computers like commodore and so on - and quite rare

the mid 90's to early-mid 2000's is the heyday of 32 bits and agp, it has games from Quake to half life 2 and so many more classics that continue in some form today. It makes sense for this to be popular, its also the time when computers became mainstream and mass market and also something for enthusiasts - so there are still quite a few around.

from the late 2000's onwards it was all about PCIe and 64 bits, windows 7 and big AAA online games and smaller indie games with downloads slowly pushing out physical media - the slow but inexorable emergence of today basically. It's not really collectable in my view, but some like a PC from this era for installing XP and having a kinda-sorta retro set up with computing power to spare. It probably wont be that 'interesting' until something really new happens. Numbers are vast too as the 2000's and even 2010's had lots of office PCs, even more than in the 90's i'd think

leileilol wrote on 2024-10-15, 03:17:

ok hardware doesn't always mean an ok user experience

Most of the issue with PCjr user experience suckage comes from IBM purposefully sabotaging it in really awful ways.

Proprietary ports
Not-Quite-Right memory map (Video memory collides with what should be 640k memory area, making 512k the effective maximum without getting inventive.)
Not-Quite-Right interrupts and IO mappings
"ISA" in a "Side-Car" that nobody else except IBM wanted to make products for. (It is of course, NOT ACTUALLY ISA, but has *most* of the signals for an 8bit ISA bus, which is how JrIDE and pals work.)

That said, it was quite interesting for having something very similar to EGA (BUT NOT, see memory mapping issue above, and others), and having the 3-voice synthesis chip.

We ddin't have many games for ours back then, as dad insisted on using it exclusively for his police casework, and got very upset with us when we'd sneak use of it when he wasn't home (Our copy of KQ1 came with the system as a bundle, to showcase the afore mentioned EGA like graphics and 3voice synthesis chip. Had tweety bird sounds, rushing water sounds, and some other primitive sound effects not found in the normal AGI PC version.).

It wasn't an altogether *awful* experience, but it was indeed *VERY DIFFERENT* from using an actual XT class system.

the Tandy 1000 was much more XT-like, excepting for its absurd take on the ISA slots (which actually WERE ISA slots), and having a bogus proprietary memory expansion, and a strange "Card-edge" LPT connector.

Subsequent iterations in the Tandy lineup were better in this regard, I understand, but I've only actually had my hands on/in the old vintage systems.

Aside from this very early entry in my computer use history, *MOST* of my experience comes from the 368 and up AT era. The first REAL computer I used was an AST Advantage 486, with an integrated Cirrus Logic video chipset, a sound-galaxy-washington, and 4mb of RAM. I have some fond memories from that period.

I like to group the games and software by Operating systems era.
I am not really into hardware.
I mostly like messing around with the games and software.
But you do want descent video and audio for best experience.

Examples:

1970’s
Vic 20
Atari

1980’s
IBM AT
Apple
DOS

Early 1990 thru 1995
486 - DOS/Win3x
Apple Color classic - MacOS 7x

1995 thru 2000
Pentium 1st gen. Win95
Pentium-II thru Pentium-III
Win95, Win98, WinME, Win2000
Apple iMac, Mac,
Mac OS 8x, 9x, 10x

2001 thru 2009
WinXP
Apple imac, MacBook, Mac Pro - OSX

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-10-14, 17:19:

For 80's to early 90's PC's / Components -- Peak interest has already passed because prices are falling?

I see prices still climbing. Hardware that was considered undesirable or just good enough now cost more than ever. So clearly demand is still up, or at least outpacing supply.

Aui wrote on 2024-10-15, 03:19:

I think the golden age is a little different than what is inherently collectible or what people may be nostalgic about, but... to me, the 'golden age' of desktop personal computers is easy to identify. At least when it comes to hardware. 1994-2006.

Interesting. I would argue that 1994 is actually the END of the golden age.

I think our positions may be more complementary, though. I was mostly talking about hardware, etc. What I think happened around 1994, give or take a year or two, is that the industry vastly expanded in, for example, number of (personal) computers sold per year. And that led to incredible innovation on the hardware side.

But on the software side, which is what you are talking about, I think you are quite right that the fact that the market got much bigger, therefore the potential money got much bigger, etc. was not helpful for creativity. A lot of software (games or non-games) in the late 1998s/early 1990s was written by small teams exploring ideas for the first time and distributing software in strange ways (as opposed to cardboard boxes at the local Worst Buy full of professionally-made CDs). I recall hearing stories of people selling shareware whose family members would just copy the software to floppies and mail the floppies out. Etc. Those small teams became increasingly corporatized, then over time, those corporate behemoths started gutting everything (look, e.g., at EA's gutting of Origin, Maxis or Westwood, or what Microsoft did to Ensemble Studios despite the great success of the Age of Empires games). And they really wanted franchises that can be played across console, PCs and later mobile.

Also worth noting - storage got bigger. All other things being equal, it takes more person-hours to fill up a CD than to fill up 4 floppies. That means higher development costs, which means you need to make more money, which means you are unquestionably more cautious, which means... yeah, eventually you get to a point where EA just wants to update sports games for new players/teams every year and charge full price.

I would note, though, that this is not just games. Look at TV or movies (in North America) - the accountants love sequels/spin-offs because they figure that X% of the people who liked the previous one will like the next one. Less and less creativity there too.