Why are 486-era computers so rare/expensive in America?

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Shadowwynd@reddit

I knew a lumber mill a couple decades ago that was built around a 486 CPU. Miles of networking and wiring embedded in concrete connecting and controlling the factory. All of it depended on a 33MHz 486 cpu explicitly for timing and coordination using custom software.

The owner of the mill routinely bought 486 machines on eBay because that was far cheaper than rebuilding everything from the ground up. The mill did $20 million a year in sales, and he couldn’t afford to shut down, start over and redo it, but he could happily spend $200 / month buying old systems off eBay so he always had a few spares ready to go at the drop of a hat.

Similar story of people with a stupidly expensive FPGA programmer that only ran on DOS, and again assuming 33MHz clock. The vendor would love to sell them another stupidly expensive FPGA programmer on modern hardware. Nope, frick that noise, we will just keep propping up the old one with eBay CPUs until something else dies.

Another client had a $6 million carpet tufting printer that only ran on XP, but drivers not available for Vista+. They stockpile used XP machines (which aren’t rare, yet) to stay running until they can sell the business and make it somebody else’s problem.

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

don't modern FPGAs exceed a dos box in terms of resources? lol how long are you waiting to flash those things?

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rc3105@reddit

Dos box doesn't have to be anything special, just needs to read the file and push it out the interface to the FPGA.

Lotta times that's just serial, parallel, SPI or some goofy ISA/PCI card and not even a particularly fast transfer rate.

I can't even imagine trying to DESIGN on a dos box these days, holy crap what a pain that would be...

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Shadowwynd@reddit

That’s exactly it. They would do the FPGA design and compilation on Windows, save it to floppy (USB to Floppy), put the floppy in the FPGA programmer PC, the DOS program reads the floppy and drives the FPGA programmer over a parallel port interface. It worked fine for their purposes, hence they had no need to change and buy the new expensive programmer.

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Shadowwynd@reddit

VHDL, and this was a few years ago, so they may have upgraded.

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MDKagent007@reddit

I still have this https://imgur.com/a/1XQmUMj

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

that's so cool

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Scoth42@reddit

They're neat but notoriously unreliable. I have one that hasn't worked properly in awhile but I keep trying.

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MDKagent007@reddit

I can agree to that, fancy but crap!

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dobe33@reddit

I still fire up my dual zenon cpu dell. And saves all the older cpu's from 8088 to zenon

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garcher00@reddit

I have my first computer in the garage, with CRT. Need to see if they still work.

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socialcommentary2000@reddit

As a long time infrastructure and IT guy...we recycled all of them.

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TiredJuan@reddit

Try Facebook Marketplace. I pick them up all the time for <$50. And that's here in the mountains. They're not uncommon in the states, they pop up all over the place. Especially if you're in retro PC buy/sell groups. Though, after shipping it can get expensive if nothing is local to you.

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UnderneathAllThe@reddit

I had a 486 66 DX2 in 1994 (windows 3.1) which was before the vast majority of people in the USA had computers. It wasn’t until Windows 95 came out bundled with new PCs that had the first Pentium processors that people began to purchase home computers. Any non pentium computers were worthless by the later 90s due to this and most went to landfills. If you’re looking for a 486 now, then you are trying to find someone who held on to a 30-year-old system that has been obsolete for 25+ years. I loved it when we had it though before we bought a windows 98 computer.

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JeffEpp@reddit

Another obsolescence issue was the explosion in size of hard drives. Practically overnight, the size went from 1-200 megabytes to gigabytes. The hardware couldn't handle the size without... suboptimal... workarounds. So, to replace an existing hard drive, some people had to replace other components, some of which were already integrated into the motherboards. And, if you're going that far, you might as well upgrade the chip to Pentium.

At to that the new need for a modem and/or network card that hadn't been standard up to this time, to allow for going online.

Older computers just kind of melted away. Many got shoved into closets and forgotten. Then junked years later.

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Graywulff@reddit

I had a pentium pro 150mhz board with the ram and a voodoo3 pci card and I told my parents I wanted it in 2016 and they threw it in the trash.

Same with a mirror door dual 1.25gz g4 with a Cinema Display 17” they just tossed that when I asked for it.

As well as an apple 2 gs and an osbourn.

My dad threw out all the old consoles, but saved like a dozen vcrs and I’m like wtf are you going to do with these? He’s like oh they were expensive will the come back?

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LowAspect542@reddit

Its probably a matter of timing, i wouldn't be surprised if people went straight from 386 to pentiums(aka iintel586) skipping the 486

386 released 1985 486 released 1989 Pentium released 1993

All 4 years apart, but unless you were tearing at the bit to get the latest processor immediately. You would have probably got a 386 in 86 or 87 and been fine using it for a good 6-8 years at which point when your looking for a new pc in 93-94 and the new pentiums are about why would you go for a 5 year old processor for your new machine your probably expecting to keep till the millennium.

Its not like today where people seem to look to buy a new pc every year or 2.

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admiraljkb@reddit

Fun thing, 8086/8088 PC's were still being sold into the late 80's and were still usable with most DOS apps unless you had a complicated 123 spreadsheet with lots of calculations. And the accounting guy with the complicated spreadsheet was probably still on a 286 with a math coprocessor into 1990. Windows was just at 3.0 in 1990. I was using a NEW 8088 XT PC in 1988-1990, and finally got my boss talked into an upgrade to a 486DX in '91 if I remember right. If you were a company, trying to save pennies, in the text era, you'd keep buying 286's as long as possible, and then finally make the 386 jump when it was required for Windows 3.1. Sure 486 was out there, but it COST... Then the tax laws back in those dark times...

This reminds me how HUGE the upgrades were from generation to generation too. Backdrop for if you weren't in IT at the time - PC upgrades at the corporate level were also SLOW and weirdly timed in the US due to the capital equipment amortization rules that computer equipment fell under for IRS taxation rules. A bank I worked at was still on 386's into 1996-1997 because they weren't fully amortized yet. Interestingly, because of their upgrade cycle, with a few exceptions, they actually SKIPPED the 486 era entirely and went straight into Pentium's. So to your point of skipping 486, from what I saw there, a lot of companies may have accidentally skipped 486 in the US due to a stupid tax laws at the time. :)

The productivity gains were insane too between generations. Where workloads like check processing was occurring, the benefit of the upgrade was pretty high. People were finishing their day's worth of work HOURS ahead of schedule with the old 386. Some of the DB folks coding/doing SQL queries for reports used to take a LOT of 15-30 minute coffee breaks. Those queries and report generation times fell to seconds to a couple of minutes.

Nowadays we're ecstatic with 15% performance uplift generationally, but back then it was much more noticeable. But the costs were HUGE at the time in comparison. My 386DX/33 DB development monster was almost $3K. But my $500 Garmin watch that's not designed as a "real computer" - probably has more compute power, RAM and definitely tons more storage..

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ICQME@reddit

I noticed not many home users had a 486, PCs were kinda nerdy/weird/expensive/early adopters, normal people at school didn't start having PCs until internet/messaging/emailing became popular. most of those people quickly left computers and only use phones now. I haven't seen the numbers but I imagine PC shipments grew a lot from 1995 until about 2010 when phones tooks over. All the normies left the PCs to the nerds who always had them.

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oclafloptson@reddit

Landfills, mostly. The 90s and 00s saw the adoption of the mindset that electronics are disposable. Once a person or organization upgraded they simply threw the old unit out

I was a kid at the time and capitalized on it. I was too poor to buy machines but would work for old non-working computers and parts, then build working machines from them. By 1998 everyone had at least one junk computer they were throwing out and were glad to be rid of. I had a closet full to the ceiling with parts dating back to '85 when my mom sent it all to the landfill in 2005 because it was "junk" and I had left home

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MaridAudran@reddit

Every so often I see them on https://www.freecycle.org

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TerminalCancerMan@reddit

Word on the street is that a lot of Chinese military equipment operates on 486s, so they've been buying them up.

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Lazy_Tac@reddit

By the time my family upgraded from a 386 the pentium processors where already out and thats what we went with

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Interesting-Cow-1652@reddit

Because they’re a novelty now. Just like my 1989 BMW, a car that could be had for $1000 15 years ago

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fuzzynyanko@reddit

A lot of old stuff is getting expensive. A used retro console is $100-200

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do-wr-mem@reddit

The US had much faster adoption of personal computers than most places, because a) middle class Americans tend to have a bit more disposable income and (especially) consume much more + are less frugal than their counterparts in other countries, and b) the PC was born in the US and the many of the most important tech companies in the world are American. Because the US had faster adoption, more people had older computers as a part of their childhood, generating more nostalgia, more retrocomputing enthusiasts, and therefore more demand for old computers now.

Even barring nostalgia, old computers are (increasingly) a big part of Americana, it's not a mistake that the Smithsonian Museum of American History showcases an Apple II. America has some of the most prestigious computer science programs/schools in the world, unrivaled tech companies (99.9% of people reading this are doing so on an American OS) and much higher salaries for tech workers than pretty much anywhere in Europe. "Computers are super cool and working with them is the path to untold riches" has been pushed towards American kids since the 90s dotcom boom. Americans have a uniquely high level of cultural exposure to vintage computers and even to tech in general, it makes sense that America is more interested in retrocomputing.

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nehpets4627@reddit

PC adoption was also quicker in the US because of our video game crash in the early '80s causing a far less thriving 8-bit micro market compared to Europe and, especially, the UK. Also, the IBM Compatible market was born in the US and, thus, grew here first.

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

I'm not sure I agree with your first point. If there were more computer users back then, there were more computers as well. What matters is the ratio of interested people to vintage computers. My theory is, as someone else posted, that Americans, on average, move more often than Europeans and computers fall victim to the trash can when they're of that certain age where they're no longer useful but not old enough to be interesting.

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do-wr-mem@reddit

There *were* and *are* far more vintage computers here, but because of that (and mainly because of the nature of those computers and how they were used, as home/family PCs) there are also way more people interested in vintage computers of all types. Few people get into vintage computers because of old office machines (most people don't sit around fantasizing about being a 34 year old office worker making a spreadsheet in Lotus 1-2-3 again) - people start with the kind of computer they played games on as a kid, so in countries where computers remained primarily business tools and PCs didn't proliferate into homes as quickly, there are proportionally fewer people who have gotten interested in retrocomputing at all. Even if they have fewer vintage computers to go around, it doesn't matter for prices because there are even less people who care about them.

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fragglepated@reddit

Check with schools in your area that may have some to recycle. They would probably give them away or you can get them cheap. At least this is the case in the US, not sure about other countries.

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Due_Capital_3507@reddit

Cause it's old junk.

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Back_Again_Beach@reddit

People just trying to make some easy money on collector craze. Same reason you see people trying to ask $100+ for shitty crt tvs listing them as retro gaming tvs.

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Beautiful-Owl-3216@reddit

Around 2001-2004 I owned a recycling company and used to buy full truckloads of these old 486 computers and CRT monitors for $2000-3000. We would quickly cherry pick through for anything that looked valuable and send the rest to Pakistan for recycling. Even then they were worth nothing. Hazardous waste.

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Wonderful_Adagio9346@reddit

When I lived in the Bronx, in the early 2000s, you could find old PCs set out for garbage collection.

My first rescued PC was built in 1990?, had a monochrome CRT, 5-inch floppy drive, and ran WordPerfect 5.0 and DOS. A local parochial school tossed an IBM running Windows 3.1 with a CD-ROM drive.

For portability, I bought an old Mac laptop with the Microsoft Suite for about $200.

As the years passed, I upgraded, swapping hard drives.

It's cheap to upgrade in the US. Laptops can be had for less than $200. Same with cellphones. Or build your own Raspberry Pi for about $100. And lots of places recycle old computers.

Why own a 486?

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rc3105@reddit

Many many moons ago, can’t even remember when, I picked up a bunch of 486 processors for like a quarter each, they were considered ewaste at the time.

I had a shoebox full, and the shoebox got misplaced :-\

Back around 2009 I was moving and the shoebox reappeared. I was like, well, now what???

I almost dumpstered them, but thought maybe the gold on the contacts was worth a dollar or two so I did a little googling.

Found a guy on Craigslist buying old chips for the gold content and he was happy to drive two hours on a sat afternoon to pick them up.

I got $2k CASH for that shoebox full of junk chips!!!

I’ve often wondered since then how much he got selling them to the next link in the recycling chain…

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

That's how things go... I mined 50 bitcoins at some point around 2009, the hard drive with them is probably on some landfill 😂

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rc3105@reddit

Yeah, I’ve got 26 bitcoin trapped on a ssd that just quit out of nowhere.

I hope to be smart enough to pull the data from the raw nand chips some day :-\

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kunzinator@reddit

Pretty sure you could pay for someone to do that for you. I would just make sure to say you want a dump of the entire drive and make sure you don't mention the bitcoin. Also, probably make a light scratch mark on the chip and take a pic so you can verify you got the correct drive back.

But, yeah now that I think of it I probably wouldn't want to let that drive out of my sight with those on it. The soldering portion of the process wouldn't be bad with a nice little Chinese rework setup. I wonder if you could just swap the memory chips from that drive over to another board of the same exact model...

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rc3105@reddit

Yeah, it's a bit of a puzzle. Commercial data recovery quotes start at like $5k with NO guarantee at all.

There's two youtubers that're standup people who I would trust with it. (they're extremely skilled techies, right to repair and so forth) One of them moved to town last year and is in the periphery of my social circles so I might take it in to him one of these days.

My day job is designing electronics, I know some folks that do hardware design at Apple and somebody that works in SSD design/mfg so I can source controllers and such.

I'm currently designing an aftermarket SSD for the new M4 mini, basically following in Dosdude1's footsteps of developing a custom SSD for the original MacBook Air and iPods that only shipped with spinning drives.

I figure maybe by the time I've walked that path I'll be able to either read the chips directly or know for certain that it's hopeless :-\

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kunzinator@reddit

I would suggest troubleshooting the ssd board and seeing if it's possible a failure in the power section. Could if so it could either be repaired or possibly bypassed by using an external DC supply soldered to the traces after the voltage regulator.

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wiikid6@reddit

486’s to me have always been in a weird place collector wise, because it’s the last “legacy” architecture before the Pentium architecture took over.

For context: you can find AT Pentium PC’s that have USB cards, PS/2 mouse headers, because even in ‘99 they could run most office software and low-end games, and up until ‘03 with XP’s release, you could run the latest operating systems.

486’s on the other hand, quickly became obsolete, and were still competing with the older 386 on the cheaper end during their time frame, which while slower, still ran 99% of a user’s productivity applications at an acceptable speed.

Basically, while definitely not rare, the 486’s were only made for a much smaller amount of time than the Pentiums and the 386’s.

Intel also had a huge marketing push for the Pentium line, which made sure people knew that “this was the future” going forward.

Windows 98SE was also optimized for Pentium systems, and with multimedia features taking off with games such as Myst, and CD-ROM edutainment and FMV stuff, the 486 couldn’t keep up.

Basically, it was so incredibly worth it to upgrade to Pentium systems, that 486’s quickly fell behind and entered recycling centers and trash bins by the end of the 90’s

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

yeah that's the thing, I actually had a 386 back then but a 486 is what I WANTED to have, and it feels like the same thing just better to me.

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sub_prime55@reddit

I'm in N.E. Ohio and have a bunch of vintage computer gear. Stuff from the 70's and early 80's is gone already. DM me...

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Nathan-Stubblefield@reddit

They were awesome machines back in the day, and electronics magazines counseled against buying anything beyond a 386. A 486 could handle the books and correspondence of your business. It could store everything you ever wrote. It could handle all your investments.

What it couldn’t do is run operating systems a few generations more bloated than it came with, or games with a lot of graphics.

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WaFfLeFuR@reddit

Because we threw them all away

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spud6000@reddit

jeez, i have a bunch i can give you for free.

here we recycle those, so odds are after it gathered dust for a couple of years someone hauled it off to best buy to get it recycled for free

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Enlightenment777@reddit

Why are 486-era computers so rare/expensive in America?

they are currently in land fills and/or went through recyclers

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questron64@reddit

I dumped palettes of 486 machines back in the day. Zero resale value at the time and they were considered ewaste.

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2ZR-FXE@reddit

For the same reason, other old stuff is expensive in Europe and cheap in America.

Now, honestly, I think it's all due to Europe being behind America in terms of retro stuff.

Source: I'm European

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NightmareJoker2@reddit

In the USA, it’s a large space of land speaking the same language. In the EU, merely trying to google stuff often yields poor results, because things are called something different in the next country. Language barriers do exist. The retro community is small. Lots of old people here in Europe who don’t know what they have or what it is called and just keep it in the attic, rotting away, possibly getting destroyed due to leaking batteries or capacitors. The largest groups of people who are into old computers can be found in Germany, France and Italy. There’s a few in the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland. Anything else? Wouldn’t know where to look. Not a lot of them hanging out in the English speaking communities like here on Reddit or on Discord that I can see. If you google computer, you won’t find anything in French. Their word for the thing is ordinateur. That’s where the fun starts. 🙃

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rugggy@reddit

my guess is that north America upgraded earlier and more quickly to newer machines so a lot were sent to the recyclers

as for if you should spend to get one, it is what it is, supply and demand.

you may have some luck if you speak to ewaste companies, or maybe you can find an Ebay listing that is local to you and skip the shipping

there are also ewaste collection points that sometimes might hide something

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IceFurnace83@reddit

I paid $50 for a CRT in Australia and came to the same conclusion that we must have upgraded earlier. Americans be giving away better sets for free.

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Danthemanz@reddit

Well had a lot less equipment in Australia I suspect. What we did have got junked long ago. I'm so jealous of the Americans and all the vintage Macintosh computers that sell next to nothing while in Australia we have scraps and broken machines selling for prices unimaginable...

Hugs Aussie made Osbourne 486

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LoveMeSomeSand@reddit

In the early 2000s my work almost exclusively used Macs and they had piles of vintage Macs just sitting around. I asked if I could have any if they worked, and the IT lady was overjoyed that I wanted to take a bunch of old 540c laptops and chargers, IIci desktops and Apple monitors.

And today people are basically giving away Macs from the early to mid 2000s. I’ve had people give me Titanium PowerBooks, old iMacs and iBooks for free.

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YandyTheGnome@reddit

My first laptop was a PowerBook Wallstreet 233mhz. Used it well into the 10.4ish era, surprisingly. Managed to snag a free iMac g4 a few years later from the trash at my mom's company, threw a new HDD in it and used it for a while.

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SpartanMonkey@reddit

I saw a Sony trinitron 19" tv yesterday at a shop for $65. I almost grabbed it. I may go back today and do just that if it's still there.

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RedRatedRat@reddit

Make them turn it on first. Check the picture.

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SpartanMonkey@reddit

They test their electronics before putting them out and have a two week return policy on said electronics. I'm on my Honda today, and I don't think I have any bungies on the bike... maybe tomorrow.

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RedRatedRat@reddit

ffs I’m trying to save you hassle by just turning it on; my last Trinitron worked fine except the mesh layer behind the screen began to pull away.
Go ahead, take it home and then find out.

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StrongFig1477@reddit

When customers call looking for a 486 system, I refer them to our eBay page. When they ask why there isn't a lot of choices and the prices are high, I politely explain supply and demand.

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PorkyMcRib@reddit

I had a 486DX100 way back when. Probably worth $1 million.

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jrgman42@reddit

There were lots of businesses that would take old stuff and spit out upgraded computers with piecemeal parts, so yeah, a lot of the 486-era stuff was swapped for first-gen Pentiums, etc.

I suspect anybody that still had anything that old just threw it in the trash. That’s what I did.

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mycall@reddit

Pentium killed the 486sx star

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Taira_Mai@reddit

The US was flooded with adverts for upgrades and American 90's PC culture was "upgrade now!" or "This game is so awesome, it forces you to upgrade".

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enemyradar@reddit

This was also true in Europe.

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Vinylmaster3000@reddit

They're nearly 30 years old and many got recycled a good 10 years ago, It's like how you could see commodore 64's and apple ]['s on the sides of driveways during the turn of the century.

They were also knocked out of the water by the Pentium line and as a result became quickly obsolete. With a 486, you could run doom at moderate fps with it struggling on stuff like episode 4 or the sequel. A Pentium on the other hand helped solidify the concept of multimedia, made Windows a huge selling point, and was much faster for many games.

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BoltLayman@reddit

on the other hand... you don't need that 486 much when a lot of Pentiums of 100MHz range available.

A lot of prev-gen chips were shifted Eastward/Eastern block/ to the developing markets and consumed by households.

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Velocityg4@reddit

There may be Pentiums available and they may be superior. That's not the point. A 486DX2 66Mhz was my childhood dream system. It's something I think of fondly. A Pentium is just a Pentium. I have no feelings about it one way or another.

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

This! Pentiums and all their iterations feel like disposable junk to me, even though I had them as well. What came before is where the magic is.

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QuantumCakeIsALie@reddit

Pentium II 350MHz is peak nostalgia for me even though we had some kind of DOS computer before.

I think it's a matter of what you had when you started to "actually" use the computer.

That said, I got a 386 laptop I'd love to restore!

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Orbitalsp3@reddit

I have a 350 P2! Love it!

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orangezeroalpha@reddit

You rich sons of guns. :)

My first build was a Celeron 300mhz which could be adjusted to 450mhz and saved us $500 or so off that speed processor.

I then later did the pencil trick on a Duron 600mhz and got one up to 1000mhz.

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Orbitalsp3@reddit

Nahh I got mine used, about 8 years ago. A kit with an Asus mobo, 128mb of ram and a P2. All pristine, no bulging caps. And I paid only $10 for the kit. I guess I was lucky to get it before all the boom for retro parts. I also got 5 soundblasters cards for like $15, ranging from SB16, Awe 32 and Awe 64. So this P2 kit is paired with a AWE32 and i'm using the original creative speakers that I also got for almost nothing. And the sound quality is amazing!

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orangezeroalpha@reddit

I never actually assumed "being worth something" was the reason I kept all that old junk, but perhaps I need to go through some closets. I certainly have old video and sound cards, motherboards, etc.

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sprashoo@reddit

Buy the cheap Pentiums, hold onto them for 5 years, and then the people who are nostalgic for a P200 will buy them off you for the same price as the 486... and you can go get your 486 :P

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BoltLayman@reddit

:-))))) Yeah, do you remember how guys were boasting about their new shiny and mighty Pentiums166MMX? When would you upgrade? .. they used to ask :-)))

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C4PTNK0R34@reddit

Earlier upgrades, easier recycling with cash bonuses, and multiple collectors that have cleaned the classic computing market.

Back in the late 90s, a lot of computer stores had trade-in sales so a lot of vintage machines ended up there and ultimately got recycled and stripped for parts and materials. The whole deal of getting a new Pentium 4 Gateway Desktop package for $600 if you traded in your old system got a lot of people into the "Internet Age" rather cheaply.

The systems that didn't end up in the recycling bin tend to be in poor condition since they were used in schools and businesses and saw a lot of wear and tear, so the ones that are still in-box as NOS or are in functional order are a lot harder to find and end up in the hands of collectors, like LGR and The 8-Bit Guy amongst other private collectors.

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hvacfixer@reddit

486, I haven't heard those numbers in a long time...

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thatwackguyoverthere@reddit

i have a couple i'm glad i hung onto. i got them outta the trash when you still found them in the trash. there also became a market, and with everything else garage sale America is trying to become rich.

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CelluloseNitrate@reddit

Shipping costs outweigh any profit you might make. Those old 486 computers are heavy.

It’s only at local thrift stores that you might find a bargain.

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algaefied_creek@reddit

It wasn’t like this with pricing before COVID. I think that COVID made people nostalgic, coupled with people recapping, installing SSDs, dual-booting tiny Linux distributions for modern features alongside elderly windows…

… made people think their $40 shitbox is the same as all the hard work as a $400 restored with care box….made others want to jump on the bandwagon so supply and demand here we are.

Even an 8088 machine, no 8087 FPU, sells for $200-550

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Adromedae@reddit

Because some Americans are willing to throw good money at old hardware for some reason?

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Champdout79@reddit

I have some 486 toshiba laptop that I got from ebay 2 years ago for around $25 missing hard drives. They work great

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Jealous-Associate-41@reddit

They have been in landfills for a long, long time. My last CRT was like 2006

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Jolly-Ambassador6763@reddit

Because America is the land of “shut up, I know what I got.” But honestly anything of that vintage is going to be refurbished before I’d even think of turning it on. eBay is a bad reference since anything is going to be listed for at least double what it’s actually worth. But certain parts are always going to ask for a premium.

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Usagi_Shinobi@reddit

Because most of them got trashed, and the few remaining ones get bought by companies that pay decent money for them because they run their business on such outdated tech. Pretty sure the oldest machine in my boneyard is at least in the GHz range, though the last time it had a functioning HDD and PSU it was running win98 se. I don't even think it's been possible to get 32 bit processors here since like 2010.

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OneHumanBill@reddit

It's all about the Pentiums!

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molotovPopsicle@reddit

this is new. the prices for full 486 machines were sub $100 only a few years ago. the hobby picked up big time over the pandemic

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zvev@reddit

I have a 286 Wyse with matching monitor. 2 20mb MFM hdd's as well! In the US. Also the fucking thing is heavy as shit.

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2raysdiver@reddit

Theory, and probably wrong, but Europeans tend to have smaller homes and apartments than in the USA. They don't have room for more PCs than they need. Another theory my friend has suggested, is that old stuff is just old stuff for most Europeans. A 400 year old 1/4 ounce gold coin is worth it's melt value nothing more, whereas in the USA it could be thousand of dollars. In the USA, a copper coin from 1878 is worth $100. In Europe, the same coin is worth one penny. I don't know, maybe they just have a different perception of what is vintage and what is antique. We have 250 years of history in the USA, they have a couple millennia of history over there. Again, probably wrong. But Americans go crazy over strange things.

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boluserectus@reddit

You're only right in one aspect and that is your last sentence. Americans are crazy about money and income.

I get old PC's donated while the people know if they put it on Ebay they get around a hundred euro, but they rather have their PC go to this friendly collector, than have a 100 euro in their pocket. A trait you will RARELY see in the US.

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2raysdiver@reddit

I'm sorry if I offended. As I said, I was probably wrong.

But, I think you miss my point. Americans, for some reason, seem to think that anything old has value because it is old. We have about 250 years of history as a country. There are people in Europe living in homes older than the Constitution of the USA. I think Europeans have a much better perspective on this point.

While I do agree that too many Americans use income as a measuring stick (and the current president-elect is a prime example), I know plenty of people that would rather give something to a good home for free, or next to nothing, where it would be used, rather than sell it on ebay, or send it to the scrap heap. But I also know several people that won't do anything without being paid.

And as I said, I was very likely wrong.

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CaryWhit@reddit

We recycled them for the gold content

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MassiveKnuckles@reddit

Not in that UK. Cheapest ok looking 486 on eBay right now is 210 pounds.

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OhCrapImBusted@reddit

Try being an Amiga fan. All over the UK and Germany…little to nothing affordable or available in the Americas.

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MassiveKnuckles@reddit

Not exactly cheap in the UK now either. But far more a500, 600 and 1200s to chose from.

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Fdisk_format@reddit

Weird I live in the UK and I always get adds on eBay for 486 pcs for around $30 but $100 shipping haha

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Fdisk_format@reddit

I mean ads for PCs in America

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LateralLimey@reddit

I've just had a look online here in the UK. I found 18 486 desktop computers for sale both working and none working. The lowest price was £80 (US$100 ), the highest £1000 (US$1260) and the average was £419 (US$529).

Hardly cheap.

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nourish_the_bog@reddit

What part of Europe do you live in to get prices like that? I'd like to get in on that too. I recently coughed up 200 bucks for a 486 all-in-one that was known broken.

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jtp28080@reddit

Right now, everything from the vintage computer era is horribly overpriced on eBay. I think it has something to do with all the interest in vintage computers. Sadly, I see the auctions reposted multiple times. It is always overpriced if you ask me.

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postmodest@reddit

My datapoint of "1" was that we upgraded piecemeal and threw stuff in the trash once we moved out of our parents houses and dorms and across country for the dotcom boom.

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

I think you're on to something... People on this side of the planet do tend to move around quite a bit more, probably sorting out their old crap in the process.

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Taira_Mai@reddit

A lot of gamers who were really into PC's back in the day were younger and tended to move around. So when they upgraded, the old PC went into the trash.

I upgraded my laptop twice become the old ones were malfunctioning - both old computers would up at the recycler. It was just easier.

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SpartanMonkey@reddit

I remember my early PC days were: Save up enough money for a better modem, sell the current one used. I swapped out my PCs piecemeal likecthat back thsn. A lot of us did, So my original rig started out as a 286-16mhz system, but that same case housed a few 386 boards as well as some 486 boards before I finally sold my whole tricked out 486 system and went on to more powerful things.

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bobj33@reddit

I tossed at least 20 486 computers into dumpsters in the mid 1990's. No e-waste recycling or anything like that. Literally just tossing into dumpsters so they're rusting in a landfill now.

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shinyviper@reddit

Just from personal experience, they’re worth $5-$10 at the recycler, so that’s where they go.

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irrision@reddit

They're worth a couple hundred on eBay. The recyclers are really missing the boat.

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StrongFig1477@reddit

No they aren't. Guess who the eBay seller is?

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mightypup1974@reddit

Sorry, where in Europe are you finding such cheap 486s?! I need to get on that!

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

Set alerts on whatever classified site is popular in your country. It will have a couple of those 300 euro listings but they don't sell, every few weeks a free or 20 euro listing will pop up and then you have to be quick.

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lesbian-menace@reddit

Americans are way more nostalgic for old IBM systems as every European I’ve known is always more into different systems often made by a company in the same region of countries they live in (ie UK and Ireland; Austria, Germany and Switzerland; The Balkans etc) IBM clones and Apples weren’t as popular in Europe until later on.
Imagine a lot of 486s got pitched in America or recycled since North America is much more uniformly developed than Europe is you’ll see a pattern with expensive goods in Europe where they start life in the western part and shift east and then either get pitched or move back west with migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe coming to the western part for better work. You can see this pretty easily with cars throughout different parts of the EU. I have a friend in Berlin who owns a mechanic shops and he tells me it isn’t uncommon for cars to make their way to Czechia or Poland and then make their way back to Berlin as they become vintage and collectible or people migrate.

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Avery_Thorn@reddit

I mean, part of it is that the 486 brand was used for a single generation of processors, the 80486 chips. They were only "top of line" for 4 years, from 1989 to 1993. Intel couldn't copyright "486", but they could " Pentium", so they started releasing budget processors under the Pentium brand name too, and they have been using the Pentium brand name for 30 years. The most current Pentium processors were released in 2022. Obviously, they were Pentium in name only, but because they kept using the name, A P1 doesn't seem so antique as a 486.

So most businesses only had one round of 486 machines. And once they were done, they were just recycled.

I mean, from the IBM PC to the Pentium was only 12 years.

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boluserectus@reddit

I've read almost all reactions, nobody mentioned the US is crazy about money. Europe is crazy about happiness.

I've met more than a dozen people who preferred to donate their PC to a hobbyist/collector like me, than go over the hassle to put it on Ebay, get strange people at your door or sending out a 30Kg package and receive a 100 euro. So I think it's a society/cultural thing.

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dunker_-@reddit

I think Americans just have a more "disposable" culture and dump things quicker.

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EmptyJumpLow@reddit

Americans are also hugely speculative and the moment they get a whiff that something is nostalgic/desirable, scalpers will buy up everything in an attempt to drive prices up.

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bobconan@reddit

The sheer number of 286 machines that people just kept using. 386 machines are ever rarer fir this reason. I would guess that there were 3 386s for every 1 286. At least that's what I remember from collecting 25 years ago. They were thick on the ground.

I would agree with u/ruggy. People here had adopted PCs much sooner here and started with a 286 which was expensive when they bought it and they just couldn't justify buying another pc for 2000-3000 dollars.

What also is true is that while the 486 was in its swing, no-name 286s were still being sold for MUCH cheaper than a 486. 100s of dollars instead of thousands. People snapped up already obsolete PCs just so they could have any pc. Some deeply unscrupulous vendors were even selling 8086 machines.

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phasefournow@reddit

I remember the town where I lived in the late 90s had a special truck that only picked up e-waste, old computer gear and TVs full time. On any street, a selection of 386/486, CRTs and Macs.

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Aenoxi@reddit

Sigh. I feel you. Even worse living here in SE Asia. This place is a vintage computer desert.

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darthuna@reddit

I have the same impression. A complete 386 AT Tower can cost around 100 to 200€ in Europe, but more than $500 in the US. Also, they are difficult to find in places like eBay, and when you find one it's located in Europe.

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

I'm following euro classifieds and the 200 euro listings don't even sell, they stay up for months on end. There's sub-50-euro or even free listings popping up but then they usually get sold within a day. You gotta set filters/alerts.

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Safe_T_Third@reddit

This is true. I’ve a 486 dx2 with a SB Pro 2 listed in Ireland for a year now for €175 with zero interest. Gave away a Pentium 1 75 system for free, and a blueberry iMac for €25. It’s just a different market

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donaudelta@reddit

PCs became more affordable in the pentium era at least in my area in eastern Europe. So 486 are very rare, and 386/286 even rarer.

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CjKing2k@reddit

I'm guessing a lot of them were repurposed for industrial use. It was much cheaper to write realtime software in DOS than a specialized RTOS.

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Baselet@reddit

I don't think many businesses run on reused home computers. There's been (and probably still is) sn industrial more fitting solution available. Like PC/104 and so on.

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NetworkCompany@reddit

Cause gold is worth more. They all melted

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donlafferty4343@reddit

Wow! I've got 5 of them. And about as many 386 and 286. I wonder if it's time to start selling.

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CAStrash@reddit

Most were tossed away when they became obsolete in the Pentium and Pentium 2 days.

Sadly the least common ones are the good ones now that had PCI rather than VLB. Built in IDE with cd-rom boot support in many instances.

I still don't get how VLB 486's ever became worth anything. They were painfully slow unless you had a VLB scsi card, and ATI Mach VLB graphics.

I can't for the life of me track down the same motherboard I had for my cyrix 586 100mhz. All the close ones have the wrong chipsets.

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BoltLayman@reddit

Probably the closing point is that, for example, I disposed my Socket7+(SDRAM/233MMX capable, but 100MHz MMX class CPU installed or worse, those infamous IDT C6 processors) THat was my home PC from '97 to early 2007. And it became a rotten pumpkin when Win98 was released.

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k9cj5@reddit

The hobby is growing and supply is not. Plus I think a lot of people who are getting into the hobby are starting to have more time on their hands (kids are older) and obviously they have grown up money but that's just my guess. If you're patient enough you can still find deals but it's getting harder and harder. Ive given up at this point trying to find a voodoo 5. It took me years to find a 486 at a good price and when I did i found like 3 of them all in a 4 month span it was crazy. Maybe it's timing?

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GoodCannoli@reddit

Everyone who had them here just threw them out when they upgraded. I know I did.

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Tokimemofan@reddit

Lot of it I think has to do with the bulk of them being scrapped for gold. The explosive price increase has hit the 486 and early pentium the hardest because those were dirt common and had very high amounts of easily recoverable gold. Later pentiums had very little recoverable gold and 386 systems were much more difficult to obtain even when they were cheap. 386 boards tend to be very unfriendly often requiring a special configuration utility as the bios settings interface was often too big to be onboard so aren’t as desirable today. Some 486 boards also are expensive because of unique features, I remember having one that could be configured with 256mb of ram for example, an amount that was an absurdity at the time

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

I remember that very moment where I was standing in the store, looking at the computer we were about to buy and thinking "lolololol expandable up to 128 mb who needs that shit"

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Traditional_Key_763@reddit

my guess is europe probably resold a lot of those to former soviet countries in the 90s so they stuck around. here in the US our IT guy just shipped 3 pallets of ibm pcs to the recycler because they're worthless

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furruck@reddit

Well that $20 price era for 486s happened around 15-20yrs ago here.. They just used 486 for far longer in Europe than they did over here.

We had that rush of cheap beige sub $500 boxes at the end of the 90s so a lot of 486s were tossed aside then, and then basically worthless until \~2015 or so when suddenly people wanted to mess with them again.

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BCProgramming@reddit

My thinking is that they are cheaper because they aren't as "nostalgic" there. Other platforms dominated over the PC longer than they did in North American. Even into the start of the 90's; Amiga, Commodore 64, Amstrad, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Acorn Archimedes/Electron, etc. So those tend to be the platforms, I think, that many Europeans who are nostalgic are looking back on. PCs are the computers that got used in businesses more than at home so there's probably less nostalgic fondness for them.

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satsugene@reddit

Earlier hardware was made to last (damn near) forever. I had some >386 machines running well into the 2000s (granted doing very little useful). Many had Y2K issues in BIOS.

Later was made with less longevity in mind because they realized obsolescence happening naturally at rapid pace (even without planned failure).

Even if Windows could run 386DX or 486, these weren’t great configurations for networked applications running over lower speed LANs, and even worse for dial up internet which was becoming much more common of a use case.

These machines were also less likely to have PCI or USB, which were attractive to consumers because of less configuration issues with Plug and Play under Windows 95 and later.

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Distribution-Radiant@reddit

Windows 95 ran fine on a decently specced 486. It could run (painfully) on a 386DX with at least 4MB RAM...

Windows 3.x could run on a 286, as long as it had VGA and 1MB+ of RAM. Except for Windows for Workgroups, 386 minimum there.

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eulynn34@reddit

You'll find the older it is, the harder it is to find. Back in the 486 days computers were not nearly as common as they became during the Pentium era and beyond. 386 and earlier stuff is even harder to find, and consequently even more expensive.

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Strostkovy@reddit

I think I have a 486 CPU Ill mail to whoever pays shipping

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Wallaroo_Trail@reddit (OP)

by CPU you mean the chip only or the actual computer? if it's the computer, I'm very interested

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