Dr. Dobb's Journal February 1999

Paradigms Past: Collecting Old Computers for Fun and Profit

Collecting can be an expensive hobby or a shrewd investment. It can also be hard to justify to friends, relatives, and the other people sharing your living quarters. Classic cars, okay. At least they don't clutter up the living room. Coins, stamps, seashells: These seem harmless fixations. But collecting beer coasters (tegestology)? I am reliably informed that the proper term for the collecting of Camembert cheese labels is tyrosemiophily.

Oh, well. I won't pretend to understand why some people collect the things they collect, but I think I understand some of the motives for collecting in general. Emotional attachment to the thing collected. Respect for the art or craft that went into producing it. Pleasure in using it (which might help to explain collecting classic cars, but not canceled stamps). Investment potential. The urge to preserve disappearing artifacts. An attempt to recapture one's youth (I'm thinking of comic books and baseball cards).

Around those artifacts that people collect seriously -- classic cars, stamps, and so forth -- a rich culture grows up. There are clubs, regional conferences, shows, museums, publications, formal methods of evaluating finds, and a history or folklore. So far, that hasn't happened with computers. Although many people collect computers, for many of the reasons listed earlier, computer collecting has not yet become an organized hobby in the sense that coin collecting or stamp collecting has. But it's about to.

Kevin Stumpf's self-published book A Guide to Collecting Computers and Computer Collectibles: History, Practice, and Techniques (1998; ISBN 0-9684244-0-6) comes at a perfect time. Kevin, a long-time computer collector, has thought long and hard about the needs of collectors, and has produced a book that could single-handedly launch the collecting of vintage computer hardware as a serious (but not too serious) hobby. Say you've decided to start collecting all the Data General hardware you can lay your hands on. Outside of dumpster diving on Route 128, where do you look? Kevin has a lot of ideas about sourcing, listing two dozen different types of sources and various techniques for scoring the stuff once you sniff it out.

One indication that collecting computers is not yet a serious hobby is that there is no set of agreed-upon guidelines for appraising the collectible worth of old computers. Kevin doesn't go so far as to produce a Blue Book pricing guide, but he does something more appropriate to the current state of collecting: He outlines criteria and methods for evaluating old hardware in terms of its authenticity, rarity, significance, and condition, and presents examples to show how to use these criteria. A VIC-20 would be a common micro, for example, an IMSAI 8080 an uncommon one, and an Apple I a rare one.

The chapters on acquiring, cataloging, storing, restoring, and repairing deal with important questions that you might not think of early in your collecting experience. How do you establish ownership if you acquire the thing through barter or as a gift? How do you transport a mainframe computer, and what do you do with it once you get it home? What information about your acquisition should you record in your collection catalog? What are the temperature and humidity limits for storing magnetic tape? How do you remove crayon marks from old paper? Kevin has also begun the process of documenting a folklore of computer collecting. The anecdotes and profiles of collectors that he sprinkles throughout this book nicely capture the spirit of collecting and the fascination that old computer hardware holds for many of us. I defy any Dr. Dobb's reader to thumb through Kevin's book and not be reminded of their first PDP-8 or TRS-80 Model I or IBM 360/22 or whatever it was. This book won't tell you how to get rich from the junk in your garage, but it will open your eyes to a rewarding and fascinating hobby, and give you all the knowledge you need to get started in computophily. This book is a first edition, ring-bound and self-published. It badly needs an editor to fix the typos and grammatical errors and inconsistencies and to rein Kevin in when his anecdotes gallop off the trail. But the depth of knowledge and the scope of coverage more than offset the book's flaws. I hope that there are many future editions (and that those editions have the benefit of professional editing). For now, I'm tickled that I have a first edition of a book that I think could become a minor classic.

-- M.S.