Some very old, expensive, and interesting computer items on ebay.

A working Atari 2600 sold to the Smithsonian for 10K - not a fortune but...

Until very recently (only the last 10 years or so) it wasn't done. Some people had signature books, the occasional signed bat or actual signed photos but that was all. Now it is being marketed as a big thing - like POKEMON (i.e. mostly worthless).

BTW, somewhat recently a bat signed by Don Bradman and the entire 1948 "Invincibles" (Australia's greatest and most famous player and team) went up for auction - until then it was held in such high regard that it laid forgotten in a shed and the owner's kids used it for backyard cricket!

I never saw such a paper. Paper, right? How I can be sure that certificate itself is not cloned?

StoneThrower

Kids don't appreciate the value of collectables -- when my brother was a teenager he once used part of my dad's coin collection to pay for a pizza he ordered -- at face value of course.

Certificate of Authenticity was very much a 90's thing, until M$oft and Intel then started doing it I doubt anyone actually had even thought of them, except for pop memorabilia.

And how would you test it? I needed some days of work to build a tester for my 4004 CPU:

and I'm still not 100% sure, because the microcontroller generates an out of spec 1 kHz clock instead of the allowed range of 500 kHz - 700 kHz. Maybe I should build an universal vintage IC tester and sell it for some kilo euro at eBay, which would be a bargain compared to such prices :-)

I'd rather have one of these:

I stumbled across this when pricing a couple of my old HP calculators. I appear to be up over $100 on the original price of my HP 16C.

priced.

Confucius say Many valuable things for sale on ebay with teeny tiny turnover.

-- Don Kuenz

over priced.

That reminds me, a few years back I noticed some items listed for greater than 10 times the going rate and they were NOT quantity 10 lots.

I concluded they were part of some kind of credit card fraud or money laundering scheme.

Why else would somebody buy an item for

Is it possible that the same kind of racket has jumped on "antique" computer items to more easily conceal the apparent money laundering?

eBay just last week formally banned listings for "intangeable" items like prayers and hexes.

"Antique" items may be the next best thing for money laundering rackets since "going rate" might be impossible to determine and fair price might depend massively on historical or personal sentimental value.

I used to be one of these 90% until 2010, in that year I had a big clean up in my house, threw virtually everything away apart from a very limited number of items I *really* like, and this made me feel sooo good! Space itself really feels better than heaps of old crap that take it up.

Rene

If you have lived in the same place for decades it is easy to accumulate and keep junk that may eventually be worth a buck or two. If you put a cost on the storage space, most stuff is not worth it. But you rarely know what is going to appreciate in value beforehand. If you have moved house several times you have probably had to make some hard decisions - I threw out one of the early prototype Microbee's with 64k static RAM, because it was s*it compared to the PC-clones available at the time I was moving. I would have kept it if I hadn't been under the pressure of moving to minimise junk.

It gets much worse if you have to move overseas..........