BigEd wrote:
There's a thread on stardot suggesting 8 bit nostalgia items are going for remarkable prices these days. It could be bored (but well-paid) people rediscovering their youth. Or it could be a price-fixing activity aimed at a pump and dump. I'm disinclined to believe in conspiracies though.
Prices do seem to have been rising somewhat over the last couple of years, and of course it's much more noticable over the five years, and even more over the last twenty. The combination of people of that generation earning more over time and the computers themselves becoming more rare would fairly easily explain it.
I very much doubt there's any conspiracy; the trend internally in Japan (which has a large and active vintage computer market on Yahoo Auctions Japan) is the same even though there's little communication between Japan and the rest of the retro world and it's an entirely different set of computers. (C64s are rare as hens' teeth here, but there's lots of market activity for NEC PC-8001/8801/6001, Sharp MZ/Z1, Fujitsu FM-7/FM77, MSX and various other Japanese lines.) And most of the discussion I see does not seem to be people who want to buy a computer to resell it for more later, but who want to buy it and keep it, which is not really compatible with pump-and-dump.