Chema wrote: ↑Fri Jun 01, 2018 11:53 am
Mmm not sure. This price escalation does no good. We are buying hardware which is 30+ years old just for nostalgic reasons, maybe for preservation.
Your calculation has a small flaw, I'd say. How many times in a year will you enjoy, or actually use at all, that hardware? That Microdisc with a 3" unit, that makes it almost impossible to transfer disk images to it? Once a month? Every two months? A few days during your holidays? The rest of the time it will be there, just as a collector's device, or even worse, stored in a locker most of the time.
It is not a flaw but a feature. Usage price means that you pay for the convenience of being able to use it at any moment you want. That convenience has a price.
The alternative would be to rent that hardware (assuming there were business to rent it to you) but then you would have the additional burden of going to the shop to retrieve it, using it as quickly as possible to keep the rental fees low and bringing it back to the shop once done.
Even then, assuming you used that Microdisk only two weeks per year, it will still cost you way more to rent over 10 years than the current eBay price.
So in the end, I think the notion of "usage price" is a nice way to put the costs and advantages of possession in perspective.
Chema wrote: ↑Fri Jun 01, 2018 11:53 am
I love my Oric. I have it permanently set up on a desk, though I boot it just from time to time to test things I develop, load tapes or disk images using Cumulus... very often using real disks. A few times a year I might turn it on just to play something. But I would not pay 200 eur for an Oric, and less for a Microdisc (though I'd love to have one). Those prices are not for me. I prefer travelling or going to the theater. It is a matter of priorities, I guess.
Of course.
This said, if you do track your budget you will probably find that we can spend way more than these 200 euros for things that are in the end way less enjoyable than our retro stuff.
Humans talk about priorities and logic all the time but we actually act very irrationally most of the time.
Also, as I said, if, in the end, one finds out that they their Oric was not worth 200 euros, they can still sell it and get their money back.
It is overall a fairly safe purchase, the price of retro computers will not go down on the long run as they become rarer.