Why do I collect computers?

Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 09:08pm

The decked out JX I spotted on eBay ended a few days ago with no bids. Since then I have exchanged a couple of messages with the seller which has prompted me to think about the purpose of my collection.

In the beginning I had an Apple IIgs which had been our family computer. Then I discovered hard rubbish collections which has been the source of around a third of my collection. Apart from unique items such as the Two Page Display none of these items have been particularly special.

Another quarter of the collection have been obtained for free from other sources, mainly through friends or relatives that gave them to me instead of throwing them out, or their work throwing them out. This is how I got the SGI Indys, the SGI O2, the IBM JX and the Dauphins.

The final five twelfths (approximately) of my collection were purchased almost exclusively from eBay with very few of them costing over AU$100, mostly lower than AU$50.

For most of this time my primary goal was to have an example of every computer manufactured by Apple. Unfortunately once I was well on the way to this goal I realised that there isn’t really anything special about a lot of them. For a while I have been thinking about reducing the total number of items and there are a lot of Macintosh models that I don’t really need to keep.

So what is my current goal for the collection?

  • Significant Apple computers and peripherals; and
  • Non-Apple items that are special, unique or rare.

Originally I didn’t think that I would pay more than a third of the asking price for that JX. Then I am thinking of paying two thirds but now I am considering going even closer the the asking price in order to get such a rare item…

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