Gibsaw wrote:Actually the thing I find amazing is the almost total lack of IBM clones.
The 286's, 386's and 486's. It's like they disappeared off the face of the earth and they must have outnumbered these 80's classics 100 to 1.
Try buying a working vanilla clone 386 these days. You're far more likely to get a working C64 or Apple IIe.
Back when I had the computer company every 286/386/ 486/ and early Pentiums taken in as Part X were broken upfor parts,
parts would fetch ( just found some old records.)
5.25" floppies $10
3.5" floppies $20
Hard drives up to 800 meg $20 above 800meg any thing up to $40
most ram would start at $10 a stick
PSU would fetch $5
even CPU's would sell for $5 each
cases would be collected into steel only and taken to scrappy for light steel scrap I think most of the other dealers would do the same, in fact a lot of us would go to Fitzgerald auction to buy up cheap computers just to break and sell at the computer flea market on a Saturday morning, we made more profit from the scrapping of old systems than selling Brade new ones
there was also a chap down in Hamilton that had auctions of computer stuff most of the computers bought at auction were only $5 a piece so we would when we got say Air NZ updating the computers end up buying about 50 computers at a time just to brake into parts ( back in the day it was often possible to take in over a $1000 in a morning at the flea market) which would offset any bad trading times during the week or cover expenses
So I am not surprised at the lack of them, and most IBM clones were stupid prices compared to Amigas or ST's ( 1999 Green computer Company were selling a Pentium 300mhz system with CD rom monitor K/B for about $3500 )