RetroComputing has become way more popular than I think anyone ever anticipated it to. It started in the early 1990's with nostalgic 20+ people looking to cheaply relive their childhoods on the kind of budget their parents would never have given them, or even just get their hands on a computer for school without needing to take out a loan, pester their parents, or change majors. Machines over 10 years old were considered obsolete and useless and garnered nicknames like "footrest" or "Dinosaur" or "doorstop", or the more insulting "boat anchor". But over the course of the 2000's-2020's, it has grown in popularity more and more as newer generations where more people were participating or wanted to than ever before. IT went from a hobby for the kind of people who collect old TV's, Radios, and Air Conditioners, to a hobby for anyone wanting to run computer software the way it was intended to run on an IBM Compatible PC. Many YouTuber's are famous for it now: LGR (Lazy Game Reviews), 8-bit Guy, Philscomputerlab, NostalgiaNerd, Adrian's Digital Basement, Beige-O-Vision, VWestLife, BBISOPPCM'S WORLD, and many others, whereas, once upon a time, I was the lone weirdo making videos of his 286 surfing the mid 2000's internet.

Today, "RetroComputing" as it's often now called, has become an en-masse hobby, albeit still niche. In 20 years, the community has grown from a handful of late Boomers and Gen X talking about their Commodore 64s and S-100 bus hobbyist machines from the 70's and early 80's, to now kids who were not even alive when the 386 or 486 came out getting into it because of how much more interesting the landscape is.

But with that popularity, comes a price, or in this case, an INCREASE in prices. I'm here to explain it, and explain the ebb-and-flow of the tide that it seems nobody talks about in special interest circles.....the truth about prices....

This entire hobby is generally entrenched in Nostalgia, ie, the interest in reliving the past that never was, because now you can afford it. The problem is, the more popular it gets, the less attainable it becomes to the masses when it comes to the actual hardware. WHile the software is pretty much cheap-as-free in most cases, the hardware has been getting astronomically out of hand over the last several years.

It usually starts with a handful of highly influential machines. In the case of the IBM Personal Computer and Compatibles - this would be the following machines....

These systems also had their own external factors that made them expensive outside of their influence. FIrst off, anything by IBM pre-1990 was pretty desireable because every generation of IBM up through the PS/2 had something special about it, or some special run of some kind. The original IBM PC had the original 16K-64K original run, the later 64K-256K later run, the PC XT had the XT/370 that could interface with servers. ALso, many people from the 80's had fond memories of using these in school, in businesses, or that rich uncle's office playing Digger and Sopwith. The PErsonal System 2 (PS/2) Series was it's whole own world of Microchannel BUS architecture, with Plug N' Play like capabilities a full 5-7 years BEFORE Plug N' Play devices hit the market for PCs en-masse.

So people sought those machines out, and I watched as they went from being for free to take, to $15 at a thrift shop, to $50 on e-bay, to over $200 on e-bay, to now around the same price some guy paid for the same machine in the 1980's on e-bay, even in junky condition that looks like it was dragged out of an abandoned coal factory. Furthermore, as the mainstream caught onto interest in these devices, we got TV shows like Young Sheldon and Halt and Catch Fire that helped sell third hand Tandy 1000s and Compaqs because of their roles in the show, or supposed subject matter the show as based on.

And like an onion, there are layers to this, where people who can't afford the full fledged IBMs and Compaqs, started to seek out the "clones". This expanded the use cases a bit as well, since the clones were not as easy to quantify their originality as they were made out of the countless millions of parts out of TAiwan, China, Indonesia, and Hong Kong in the 1980's (not to mention better places like Japan or the United States at the time), leading to some rather unique machines out there. This drove the prices of clones up.

The prices on PC/XT and AT class computers started to rise in the mid 2000's. During that time, I paid $37 for a GEM Computer Products 286 AT Clone, I spent about $47 on a Compaq Deskpro 386 in darn near mint condition complete with the case keys. I also bought a COmpaq Deskpro 286 around that time for $25 as a barebones system. My old bandmate hawk scored an original IBM PC XT 5160, late edition, with a 720K Floppy and Hercules Video for around $30 - the full setup, wiht hte friggin keyboard in the original box even. And at THAT time that seemed rather high. THose same systems now would have been in the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for the IBM unit.

386/486 systems became more popular around the time of 2010 when LGR, Adrian's Digital Basement, and 8-bit Guy - formerly the iPad guy - started taking off, and people started gaining interest in these vintage IBM Compatible systems beyond the 286. Over night, I saw systems that in 2000-2010 were going for $10-15-20 at most, anow going for over $100 on e-bay. It's gotten so mad now that a lot of people have some unreasonable expectations.

One guy I know for a fact, on E-bay, has a $28,888.88 pricetag on a Rare but not exceptionally so IBM Butterfly Keyboard ThinkPad Laptop. The IBM ThinkPad 150s are also heavily sought after. Actually, the IBM ThinkPads, Compaq LTE and Cortura, and Toshiba Sattelite and Tecra series from the 90's go for top dollar a lot. I'll take the blame for driving prices up on the NEC Versa since I was touting those when those three models were getting expensive, and now it seems my interest in Sager/NanTan/Kapok has done something of the same thing. Vintage 486 laptops with sound and color video are something very sought after.

So much so that the future of this hobby, on actual hardware, is going to lie in devices like the Hand386, Book 8088, and Book 386 devices - a trio of new portable computers based around surplus electronic components and built to a cheaper standard, using open-source firmware and software, and sold at around the same price as a old ThinkPad or NEC Versa with an insane e-bay seller asking the prices.

But the prices on those devices still outedge that of a higher quality vintage notebook or laptop PC with similar or better specs from some other brand you might not have heard of. IT seems the brands cycle around on who wants what.

Let's talk about laptops in a little more detail - Vintage IBM Compatible Laptops are probably the shakiest thing you can throw down money on. For that first NEC Versa 40EC I bought in 2019, I spent about 3-6 months on e-bay courting various laptops before choosing to take a risk on that $35 laptop that "worked the last time I put it in storage". I still had to replace the motherboard at one point.

Almost all of these vintage laptops have the achilles heels. The most infamous are laptop hinges - usually because of congealed, no longer lubrication, lubricants that are gummying up hinges, mixed with brittle, brominated plastics from the early 1990's that crack and chip like an aging porcelin sculpture under all but the lightest of forces. Another common issue are trackballs with rubber spinners that are dried up, rotted off, or no longer tight enough against their shafts to move the arrow around the screen. Laptop screens that are delaminating, leaving big wide spots in the middle of poor picture quality. The batteries of course don't work, some use really weird CMOS Batteries, some have special hard disk caddies that don't always come with the unit, and a great lot of them have strange power supply connectors that are hard or impossible to find new or used anywhere today.

But if you spend $150-200 on a Book 8088/386 - you get a brand new machine, but it still needs to use ISA Slots for expansion, which makes it less portable, and it has no direct network connectivity, requires dongles like an old Laptop for the serial port, some of the displays can be out-edged by a decent TFT from the early 90's, and the keyboards on the old units are better.

However, the one thing I've forgotten in this whole tirade, is that nobody is printing more of these devices. Once they are gone, they are gone. THat's why it's up to us to be custodians to the preservation of what is left, whether thats an old Armel 386 SX laptop, or someone's old cranky Packard Bell 316SX. And that's another part of the