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Gold in that thar garage?

Like a lot of the people reading this, I got into the microcomputer game right at the start.

Back in the mid/late 1970s, microcomputers were not the type of thing you just wandered into the local white-goods store and picked up for a few hundred dollars.

If you wanted one of these new-fangled microcomputer things, you either had to be very rich (and buy something like an Altair for an offensive amount of money from the USA) or you simply had to be modestly rich and build it yourself.

Like most others at that time, I opted to build my own and learned an awful lot about the electronics and software in the process.

I recall working until sunrise on many occasions and writing software in hand-assembled machine code on a role of lunch-paper that stretched for tens of metres when laid out in a straight line.

Of course I eventually broke down and bought a "ready to run" system from time to time, the first being an Ohio Superboard. This was just a large PCB with a keyboard attached and which contained a 6502 processor, 8Kbytes of ROM BASIC and (I think) about 8K of RAM.

The board itself cost an enormous $400 back in the late 1970s -- and that was a lot of money then - certainly more than a whole week's pay.

Of course you also had to provide your own screen and power supply -- plus some type of case if you weren't a geek like myself who found great beauty in the expanse of 74-series TTL logic chips that littered the thin fibreglass and copper sheet.

I never met anyone who was lucky enough to own an Apple 1 but if I had, I bet that right now they'd be jumping for joy or kicking themselves - because one of the rumoured six working examples of this device sold last week for an astonishing US$650,000.

Given that there were only about 200 of these systems ever made, the chances that any of them made it to NZ is pretty remote -- but they certainly seem to be worth gold today.

I wonder how much that old Ohio Superboard would be worth - if I hadn't tossed it out decades ago :-(

Who'd have thought, all those years ago, that the gear we were using and eventually tossed as being "outdated" and "superseded" might be worth so much money today?

I'm sure that a "new in box" ZX80 would be worth a fairly sizable sum and even an NIB Apple II would likely command a healthy wad of cash these days. However, I am surprised to see that Apple II computers in "original" condition are being sold on eBay these days for trivial sums. Perhaps they'd also be a good investment if you're prepared to wait a decade or two for their value to increase.

Even other "iconic" microcomputers from the late 1970s are selling for paltry amounts -- look at this TRS80 model 1 for instance.

I'm picking that there's probably a lot of money to be made over the next 15-20 years by those who carefully invest in this rapidly disappearing hardware from the dawn of the microcomputer era.

And, just in case you never had a real Sinclair ZX80, it's not too late to pick one up for a song.

How many Aardvark readers have bits and pieces of really old micro hardware that might be worth something -- either now or in a few years time?

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