Will PCs become classics?

[alexh]

Lots of people have started collecting classic 486 and below PCs to play DOS games. No one would have thought that these old timers would ever be desirable again (at least I never did).

But does anyone think people will want to collect more powerful classic PCs (especially ones not produced in large numbers)? Especially if no-one ever owned one back in the day?

I ask because I've got a dual CPU Opteron motherboard, I bought a used PC case from work and it was inside. Never seen one before. It works but its too old (mid 2000s) to be of any use for my day to day computing.

I looked on Amibay and I don't see many sales of Opterons. I think they were a different architecture to AMD64 we know today?

Curiosity or waste of space? Attic or WEE?

(I'm not interested in a valuation and this is not a sale, it's about desirability now and in the future of unusual x86/x64 PCs)

 

[Bryce]

I think the chance of collection will depend more on what OS the hardware supports. People may keep/collect a PC because it runs a certain version of windows they need for certain games, rather than the actual hardware inside.

Bryce.

 

[mzry]

The only thing that makes old computers worth collecting is two things: 1 - it has some kind of unique hardware that isn't available any more & 2 - It runs software and games that are difficult to run these days, holding nostalgia value.

So the way I see it, anything Pentium 4 & newer = junk, just slower iterations of what we have today, nothing unique.

A quick list of worth-while valuable old PC technologies:
CPUS:
Pentium 3 Tualatin (As the core was famous for being extremely efficient, it was re-implemented into the intel 'core' series after the P4 failed)
Pentium 2 (The cool slot 1 form factor holds a lot of nostalgia for people, unique)
The first AMD Athlon Slot A (The cool slot A form factor holds a lot of nostalgia for people, unique)
Pentium Pro (The original pentium but with onboard cache, they were extremely expensive and used their own socket 8 motherboards, unique)
Motherboards:
The 440BX chipset and most notably the Asus 440BX (famous for its absolute stability, compatibility and overclockability)
Asus TUSL2 (The definitive Tualatin motherboard, which had modded performance bios's released)
Graphics cards:
Rendition Verite (One of the first 2D&3D inclusive designs, unique in the way the core was re-programmable like an fpga, also had the very first 3d accelerated port of quake Vquake)
Nvidia NV1 (Nvidias first graphics card, used quad rendering rather than triangles, just like the sega saturn, very unique)
Nvidia Geforce 256 (The worlds first GPU implementing hardware based transform and lighting, previously was offloaded to the CPU)
PowerVR PCX1/2 (The first tile based rendering graphics card, very efficient - also cool since powervr is used in modern smart phones)
PowerVR Neon 256 (Unique as it was the same or similar technology as used in the Sega Dreamcast)
Matrox G400 MAXX (The most powerful direct3d card that competed with the voodoo3 and nvidia tnt2 ultra, also introduced environmental bump mapping)
Matrox Parhelia (Famous for its use of fragment antialiasing and extremely high quality 10bit colour)
3dfx Voodoo 1 (Famous for being the first fully featured 3D accelerator for OpenGL, Direct3D and Glide, supporting all period features and blending modes, 3D only card)
3dfx Voodoo 2 SLI (Famous for being double the performance of the previous card, plus introducing SLI scanline interleave, linking two cards together for double speed)
3dfx Voodoo Banshee (The first successful introduction of the 3D voodoo core and 2D into one chip, also unique as the GPU and RAM mhz could be changed seperately)
3dfx Voodoo 5500 (The first dual chip graphics card solution, also introduced hardware T-Buffer effects and RGSSAA anti aliasing)
Sound cards:
Aureal A3D Vortex (The first hardware HRT sound tracing card with absolutely amazing 3D sound, was bought by Creative labs and squashed)
Creative labs AWE64 Gold (The ultimate ISA dos card for quality, compatibility and features)
Creative labs X-Fi - original models (The last of the old>modern sound cards that still supported hardware based features and the windows HAL hardware abstraction layer in Windows XP, after XP 7 onwards hardware 3D sound was removed)

This is just a rundown from my own memory so don't shoot me down if I made the odd mistake.

 

[alexh]

@Bryce : The HDD in the computer has Windows (2000 or Server) and some Linux distro on it. Nothing of any real interest. Unlikely to run anything of any interest that they can't do on stuff today.

@mzry : That is pretty much what I thought and if this had been a more common Intel or AMD64 it would already be in the WEE bin at work.

 

[matt020]

Because the "PC" has so many clones, they are a dime a dozen, and are not unique.

 

[Slx]

I‘ve made a personal decision not to keep any PC stuff (although I kept all my 8/16/32-bit Ataris) as I used them mostly for productivity and don‘t have especially fond memories. I gave my last (2002-vintage) PC to a school (which needs it for some old robotics lab software) and at that occasion transported another very neat and elegantly built P4 (high-end HP or such) which triggered a kind of ‚want it reaction‘. So I‘d say there are well-built machines that merit collecting but the only PC collection I‘ve seen so far is a ‚museum‘ in a farm village half an hour from here where about 200-300 no-name clones are stacked up against a wall. Given the possible variations it‘s unlikely any significant percentage of PC history can be preserved for posterity, hell I even wonder if all that stuff offered sells now.


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[AlexC1981]

There are some PC keyboards considered classics. IBM Model M for instance. I have a soft spot for the Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical that came out in 2000.

I have a slim cased Dell under my desk, Pentium 3 I think, Voodoo 3dfx Banshee, Windows 98. Bought for £10 about 10 years ago because I wanted to run some old 3d games that wouldn't run on virtual machines with the proper 3dfx capabilities. I already had the graphics card stored from back in the day.

It's not been fired up for years. The main game I wanted to play on it was the 1998 version of Battlezone, but that has been remade for modern PCs now. There is still a certain enjoyment to be had. The floppy sound at start up, the CD whizzing round, the click click of the HDD. And the visual crispness of the Windows 98 operating system. Back when Windows didn't use contractions and talk to you like a mate.

 

[SaviorX]

the short answer is no, there's just too much 'clone' hardware out there.

the real answer is a lot longer, and I don't really want to get into all that, atm...

but to make it as short as possible... -some- PC models, and hardware are already 'classic', the IBM 5150, being the first official 'PC', specific models of other machines, PS/1, PS/2, Tandy, even the PCjr in it's way (a badly shaved down XT really, but collectable to a certain degree...)

who here wouldn't love to be given a Commodore PC 'clone'? or find a garage full of them...?

there are other things which are collectable of course, early SBs, GUS, PAS...

in general: no... specific items: of course.

I will also add, however, that there seems to also be some desire for lower end machines, to run DOS (particularly for games) and early Windows etc, which seems to give even 'clone' XT, 286, 386, 486 and even early Pentiums some additional value.

having said that, that 386 isn't going to rival an Apple I in value 20 years from now...

 

[Howard81]

Of course they will, I collect old PCs too. Most Pentium-era hardware is becoming increasingly collectable these days.

 

[Timtheloon]

Certain Hardware will definitely become collectable, you can see this with the Voodoo video card collection and 2mb ISA Video cards

 

[uligli]

Absolutely, all the sentimental value and rare hardware are the main reasons to become collectable, just like the game consoles, so many good modern games but im still in love with all those Game & Watch handhelds

 

[10001001sos]

I can personally see hardware that introduces some new technology and is the first of its kind being valuable some day (3DFX accelerators, and maybe the nVidia RTX series someday). Sometimes its value can be high if the product was a flop/not as many were sold (Creative 3DO Blaster, Gravis Ultrasound Extreme, etc). But remember that something is only worth ass much as people are willing to pay for it, and that sentimental value != market value.

 

[Harrison]

I think collecting is often dictated by community. If you have a very active scene with many people discussing and using a platform then interest in obtaining it rises. With retro gaming on the ever increase at the moment many want to build and relive older PC games so are suddenly all trying to find working hardware, pushing the prices up.

 

[bestjunky]

I saw ads for Gravis in the past, but never seen actual cards until recently. I tried retro games with it, and although sound is technically superior to Vibra 16 that I had, it does not produce the sound that I remember. So after all the testing, I settled with a crappier card, because of a personal flavour of nostalgia. For mod tracker GUS is kickass, but that can be done in emulation just fine. Certain demoscene releases were programmed exclusively for the GF1 chips, but one has to be pretty dedicated to retro demoscene to have to consider a card just for that. I have the Classic, but I mostly run Sound Blaster. It's what most people find familiar.

 

[-Acid-]

The nature of PC's especially these days make them such throw away hardware. How could anyone hope to collect every graphics card that has been released in the last 10 year alone? Up to the early 3D era into the early 2000's has nostalgia value because you could literally see the improvements and new features they added to games with each incriment in power. But now you can barely tell the difference from one model to the next as the performance increases are so insignificant between models and most of the time you couldn't even tell the difference without software to tell you what the frame rates are. As with most things right now, 2D and early 3D stuff is what is collectable.

 

[mitchtaylor]

There are some pc brands that made interesting cases, for example Alienware. Their older metal towers and laptops are collectable by enthusiasts as they often had mechanical moving parts as part of the design. I understand sony viao laptops have similar followers, there must be others.

 

[Valentyn]

There are some pc brands that made interesting cases, for example Alienware. Their older metal towers and laptops are collectable by enthusiasts as they often had mechanical moving parts as part of the design. I understand sony viao laptops have similar followers, there must be others.

I've a friend at work that has been holding onto their original Alienware green case for years. She's been saving it for a retro build as well.

I think like Harrison said, it's a lot of nostalgia as well. In hindsight I regret giving away so many things from my youth, and seeing the prices of them now; although it's been an extremely fun hobby collecting it all again.