Collecting, was: ZX80

[Scott Stevens]

On Thu, 10 Nov 2005 15:52:30 -0800
"Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:

> On 11/10/2005 at 8:49 PM Jules Richardson wrote:
> 
> >I suppose the name Sinclair is closely tied to the early days of the 
> >home computer boom, and at least in the UK people will think of his 
> >products before the likes of Commodore or Apple.
> 
> I don't know--if I were a collector (and I'm not--the junk just accumulates
> here without me trying), I'd be looking for not-very common items.  Like a
> National Semi Starplex,  or one of the AMC amZ8000 development systems.  Or
> that Durango F-85 that I can't seem to give away.  Nice expensive boxes
> that didn't see a lot of production.
> 
> How about a People's Computer right out of Berkeley?  Wood case with a
> brass nameplate.  I passed one of those up some years back--but they were
> real.
> 
> Why fool with the ones that enjoyed 5- and 6-digit production numbers?
> Reminds me of a co-worker a long time ago when the US Treasury decided to
> change the penny to its current design.  He spent years collecting
> Indian-head pennies by going to the bank and filtering change (then
> re-rolling it and exchanging it).  He proudly told me one day that he had
> over 100,000 of the things and was going to clean up in the coins market.
> He never did--100,000 of anything isn't particularly rare--and I suspect
> there were still millions of the things still in circulation or sitting in
> jars in cupboards...
> 

Must have been a long, loooong time ago.  The US Treasury stopped making Indian-head cents in 1909.  Or did you mean the 'change in design' that happened in 1959 when the reverse was changed?  Or the design change in 1983 when the coins stopped being made of bronze (with an actual bullion value near the worth of one cent) to bronze-plated zinc (uh, US Mint: places like Germany near the end of WWII were minting their coins out of zinc.  Take a hint.)

Yikes.  Topic drift.

Some things are valuable because they are rare.  And some collectors revere things mostly if they are rare.  Then, some people just want one of each design of some category of thing and a few examples just _happen_ to be rare.

In my humble opinion, a hobby category becomes fairly tedious and boring when it becomes a matter of 'rarity for the sake of rarity' for a significant part of the hobby's community.  Collection-based hobbies where the publisher/producer of an item specifically limits the number just to _produce_ rareties (i.e. anything at all that has 'Collector's Edition' printed prominently on the original packaging) are the worst.

But other people float their boats the way they like, I guess.  I make some spending money myself from time to time manipulating the 'scarcity' phenomenon on eBay so I shouldn't cast stones.

Who's going to win the SYM-1 up for bid on eBay right now, BTW?


> Cheers,
> Chuck
> 
>