[Fwd: raising awareness re: classic hardware]

[Eric Dittman]

I've received the following from Dave McGuire, who is a fellow DEC
collector (some of you know him):

 >   Hey folks.  I just had a disturbing conversation with an eBay seller
 > up in Canada.  One of his auctions was for DRAM chips "for gold scrap"
 > that he claimed to have "removed from some old DEC computer".  I sent
 > him a question asking him what happened to the rest of it, and
 > reminding him that "some old DEC computer" was likely worth orders of
 > magnitude more than the trivial amount of gold that one might glean
 > from recycling DRAM chips.
 >
 >   He replied with this:
 >
>> Not anymore.  In case you haven't noticed, the market for DEC PDP 
>> stuff is gone.  All of the collectors have as much as they want and 
>> nobody is actually using Qbus anymore.  The same happened about a year 
>> ago with IBM MCA stuff.  You can't even get $10 a card anymore.  I've 
>> shipped out hundreds of pounds of DEC Qbus and IBM MCA for scrap 
>> metals.  You should do the same.
 >
 >   This is, of course, COMPLETELY incorrect, aside from being
 > disturbing.  The DEC collector market is booming like never before,
 > and growing like crazy.
-- 
Eric Dittman
dittman at dittman.net