We proudly present: the New and Updated, Definitive and Utmost Important Ebay Price List of Rare Vintage Computers. Again as an .xls file.
After one year of recording Ebay prices now the new list. Here some statistical data from it:
- Number of computer models in the list: 128
- Number of recorded sales: 1383
- Overall market volume: 291270 Euro
- Average price per device: 211 Euro
- Median of average prices : 168 Euro
The models that sold most numbers were:
- Atari Falcon 6.2%
- Commodore SX64 13.4%
- Commodore PET2001 6.5%
- Commodore Amiga 4000 8.0%
- Sinclair QL 11.4%
- Sinclair ZX80 5.7%
i.e. 6 models had over 51% of all sold computers! Therefore, in the next time I will conclude the pricing of SX64s and QLs and freeze their entries in the list, so I will not record further Ebay sales of them, saving me 25% of the work…
The most expensive regularly sold computer I recorded was an Altair 88000 for 2361 Euro. The most expensive sales of the not so regularly sold models were a Golden C64 for 3433 Euro, a Mac Portable prototype for 4307 Euro, and a C65 for a whopping 7191 Euro!
The list is a .xls file readible by OpenOffice Calc or Excel. The first page gives you some overview data. The second page is the most important one giving you the
- Company (i.e. manufacturer)
- Model
- the number of devices produced (hypothesis 1)
- the number of devices produced (hypothesis 2)
- average price in Euro
- number of recorded sales
- the overall amount of revenue of this model (i.e. column 5 * column 6)
- The old-computers.com collector index of this model (i.e. the number of devices of this model the registered collectors claim to have on this web site)
- The ratio of the number of devices produced (hypothesis 1) divided by the number of sales. I will explain this ratio and some of the values in an own post later on.
- Remarks
The fourth page collects the prototype models (which are not part of the overview data). The sixth page lists a few clones. The detailed recordings of the sales start at page 9, one page per model. These pages are used to calculate the values on the second page.
Please note that, although the list is now one year old, almost no category in it is already, therefore the price and the number of sales of some models are not yet statistically relevant (e.g. I included Robotron and RFT models only lately).
Please note also that my selection of computer models in the list is still somewhat arbitrary. It’s all my fault.
If you still want to access the old list (and I don’t know whether anybody should want that, please find it here).
I’d love getting some feedback on the list (positive or negative). Come on, be the first one ever to leave a comment on this blog :-).
Rare & Old Computers 
March 25, 2009 at 17:46 |
[…] Ebay price list 17.03.2009 as a post By cyberfritz Explanations can be found in this post. […]
September 9, 2009 at 23:36 |
I am one of those odd owners of a Powertran Cortex. I’ve been actively researching them and can confirm the existence of 14-15 Cortex machines and a single Cortex II. My sources include the users listed on OldComputers.com. I estimate that no more than 300-400 Cortex machines were produced and that less than 100 of those were of the Cortex II model. The estimate is based on the membership of the old Cortex Users group in the UK. As this was a kit machine, a significant portion of the users would have joined this group, and the only mention I’ve ever seen on its membership put it at less than 75 users, for about one in five of the total user base. Note that survival rates may indicate a downward revision of Cortex II numbers is appropriate as well.
Note also that there are at least four models of the Tomy Tutor as well: Tutor (US model, at least 15,000 exist from serial number analysis), Pyuta (Japanese model), Pyuta Jr (Japanese model), Pyuta II (Japanese model), and Grandstand Tutor (a UK model that is rumored to exist and which was reviewed but which no one seems to have today).