> Recent activity on the list, especially the "Ka... ching!" thread, has > had me reevaluating a lot of what I get out of this hobby. I think there > are two things going on that make it less fun for me now: The money, > and the age of the stuff. I'll try to explain.
Perhaps I am one of the lucky ones (for once). I started being interested in classic computers long before most people, Back when I could find interesting machines that I could afford. And I have kept them. For all people told me to 'downsize the collection' when I was moving house, I moved the lot. So while I am saddened by the price rises, it doesn;t affect me too much. I have enough projects to keep me going for the rest of my life and then some :-) (And before somebody asks, yes I have made a will). The problem for me (being selfish) about high prices is that if I am missing some option that I want/need, I am probably not going to be able to afford it. It does sadden me, though, that many enthusiasts are not going to be able to get interesting machines to play with and learn from. I am very much in favour of running these old machines, the sort of collector who buys them as an investment and never turns them on has nothing in common with me. And I do not accept that people who have paid a lot for a machine will look after it better than those who (a few years earlier) got it for peanuts. The nostalgia aspect doesn't really interest me. I do not want the home computers that friends had, I do not want to play the games I didn't play years ago. I want interesting pieces of electronics that I probably hadn't heard of when they were current. The age of the hardware doesn't bother me. Sure I have to replace antisocial mains filter capacitors, replace failed ICs, etc. But I was doing that 20 years ago. So that doesn't seem to be a recent problem. I do feel the hobby has changed. I haven't, which is why I don't post much here any more. When I started it was all people trying to restore and run the genuine old hardware. Now it seems there are a lot of emulators running on hardware I don't understand. And add-ons to perfectly understandable and hackable machines using microcontrollers and FPGAs that you can't probe with a logic analyser. That sort of thing is what I got into classic computing to avoid, so I am not going to put such devices into my PDPs, etc. -tony
