68k Mac Prices from Yesteryear

[JDW]

I was browsing through some very old posts in another forum last night, revisiting the past, when I stumbled across the post below by Jag.

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jag Starting Member 22 Posts Posted - 14 Aug 2003 Readers of my site have seen dozens of my posts re: buying old Macs cheap. Here in Austin you can buy 10-20 Classics on a pallett for $5 as there are hundreds dumped each year along with other 68k Macs. Basically the more students you had in the 80's and 90's in any given city, the more old cheap (often free) 68k Macs are around. When I worked at goodwill in the late 90's, we had 10-20 68k Macs donated a DAY for 3 years! We had so many we coudln't GIVE them away, simply not enough mac savvy customers who wanted and old slow beast for $5 : ) JAG http://www.jagshouse.com - the web's oldest classic Mac site, used Mac goodies for sale.

What Jag said so many years ago is both tantalizing and sad for us today. In the late 1990's and even in 2003, people could hardly give them away. These days, prices for even the most uninteresting 68k Mac models command a princely sum. Prohibitively high pricing probably keeps a lot of people out of the hobby. Imagine how much more popular our community would be if we could still get 68k Macs for $5 a pop or even free!

 

[trag]

Back in the 90s, The University of Texas at Austin held a surplus property auction three or four times a year at a warehouse at the Pickle Research Center. That's probably where Jag was seeing pallets of Macs. I bought 15 pre-Plus Macs at some point for some small sum. Probably under $100. Sold them to some guy for about $10 each when I got tired of them taking up so much space. That would have been before 1994. I remember where I was living at the time.

One problem was the auctioneer was ignorant and threw all the PC and Mac keyboards together into one big lot. So good luck getting your pallet of Macs with any input devices.

At some point in the later or mid to late 90s Texas changed it's policy so that all the surplus property of computer type had to go to the penal system, instead of to the university auction.

Of course, Jag may have been purely referring to what he saw at Goodwill.

At one early auction I won thirteen or fourteen large (~ 16 X 18 X 30) boxes of Apple Service parts from the UT Microcenter for $130, IIRC. I spent the next two years selling that stuff on comp.sys.mac.wanted. I remember shipping a new Lisa CRT to a guy in Japan.

 

[S. Pupp]

Around 2005, I bought a IIfx in perfect condition for $5. A few years earlier, I’d bought an SE/30 with Xceed video card from Computer Renaissance for $10, and a Quadra 840AV for $20. I still have the first two. Those were the Golden Days.

 

[Daniel Hansen]

Getting Macs for free from the local university while I was a student is how I started my collection back around 2000. Faculty were putting them outside their offices for garbage collection - I basically got blanket permission from Facilities to pick up any ones I wanted, saving them the trouble. Portables, SE/30's, LC's of all kinds, 512k's, Pluses. I filled up my car a few times... I never saw any palettes up for purchase at any point however, could be I was looking in the wrong place.