68kMLA

I never had a Sun Ultra, but between 1996 & 1998 at Manchester Uni I had a Sun IPX for my MPhil. I felt really privileged to be using a genuine Sparc RISC workstation even if at 40MHz, it wasn't as fast as a basic Pentium PC. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/196475645817

Good thing I don't care about anything other than Macs.

I only care about classic Macs and classic PC's from the late 90's

The good old days where you could find cheap SUNs, Amigas, Atari ST, 68K Macs, etc are over. The only cheap stuff you find now are obsolete PCs since everything else is defunct and people expect too much for obsolete Macs.

The whole 'Retro Nostalgia" scene has ruined it really. Dwindling supplies (these things aren't getting any younger) and increasing interest just means pricing will continue to rise. I actually watched an LGR video on YouTube where he talks about that a good bit.

I get that nostalgia comes in never-ending waves that drive prices up, but I'm talking about listings for machines like this HP or this bugly Asus. Is there a dot that I'm not connecting here? Are these machines in any way desirable or is this just wild over-pricing in the hopes of harpooning a nostalgia whale?

Go look at what those models actually sold for, not what some people list them for.

People buy machines for all kinds of reasons. Some people do want the exact system they had as a kid, some just want a specific case, some just want the motherboard, CPU, and add-on cards, and some want a system from a specific brand or time period.

Good example: I still see PB1400s for sale for $300 sometimes. I’ve never even payed close to that.

I would comment but recently spent far too much building a P4 desktop I haven't even used. Probably spent more than £200 on parts, was the PC worth that? No. but they where the exact parts (or as close as I could reasonably find) to the first PC I ever had as a kid. Retro nostalgia is now hitting for my generation and that's whet we all had

Just wait till kids who started on laptops want to find working ones in 10-20 years.

This is why I keep all my Macs, even if I retire them. You never know when you want to go back to using them.

I've been seeing a lot of that, poking around to see if I can get a decent DOS+WFW system, it seems like the thought process is that XP runs on a pretty wide range of hardware and runs most 9x games basically fine, so, just slam XP on an i5-2400 and call it a vintage gaming PC.
Which, like, fair I suppose.

@chikorita157 Nearly all of mine are ones I acquired over time or were given to me. I've only bought two, and at comparatively "normal" prices.

DOS spanned a long time and I use 286 to Pentium I's for that era. People who run XP on a I5 can't play early games at the correct speed and do not have the correct sound cards.

ebay has done thing thing everyone else does where what you search for is not really what it searches for. godawful search is what it is.