A few expensive and collectible PCs

by

December 14, 2012

Vintage Computers

While many people would die for the latest laptops and tablets, there are a few people who would spend millions of dollars for an old PC that doesn’t even boot up. It might sound crazy but there are some collectors who are ready to pay millions of dollars for some old computer that has been obsolete for more than decades. They can give the latest iPad, MacBook or any other cool PC an inferiority complex with their price and demand.

The demand behind such a computer is entirely sentimental with no real life application. These PCs cost a fortune because of their antique value, not functional abilities. Although these computers might not have that much power to do a simple math equation, these are the devices that changed the way of our modern civilization. This is why some people won’t even think twice and pay any amount without hesitation for a PC that someone else would have thrown away a long time ago.

Among such items, the Apple Lisa is a popular name which was considered more sophisticated than the Macintosh. It had some groundbreaking features such as protected memory, cooperative multitasking and a sophisticated hard disk based operating system. This PC will cost you up to $25,000 today. Close to Apple Lisa, there is the Cray T94 series also known as the Triton. It was the last model of vector-processing supercomputers featuring 450 MHz clock cycle and two-wide vector pipes which were liquid cooled. Although it was around $39 million in 1995, you can get this one at only $3,000.

These are not that much different than the German Enigma Machine which was used in World War II. One of these recently sold at auction for £85,250 which is a huge price for a device almost a century old. Another computer from the same era is the 1918 Herman Hollerith which is regarded as the father of modern automatic computation. Named after the developer, Herman Hollerith built this first punched-card tabulating & sorting machine. Later on his company went on to become IBM. It was recently sold on eBay for $2,300. However, none of them will come close to Defender, one of the most popular arcade games which sold for 1.2 million dollars in 1983.

Have questions about your aging computer systems? Call us today and we can help you find a good home for the old ones while providing your business with the best in new IT systems.

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