Who's been collecting the longest?

[chip68]

Just curious... I've been amassing "vintage" chips since about the spring of 1976, and the bulk of my collection - over 6000 ICs at this point, some dating back to 1962 - was obtained prior to 1988, largely via the surplus market.

How about the rest of you folks?

- CMW

[Minuteman]

For me only 3 years...

[andamus]

Hi,
I've start to collect few cpus since 2000, in the end of 2002 I found the Granpa site and I realized "I'm not alone in the universe" or "I'm not the only mad on the heart that collect cpu" so I start to collect them seriously.

Andamus

Wish you an happy new year

[ahia123]

Since autumn 1975.

[gshv]

I started collecting in February 2002.

Gennadiy

[jrmunro]

I started to collect in 2000. I did some searches on the internet to see if anyone else did this and couldn`t find anything. It wasn`t until I went to Ebay and saw all the chips for auction that I knew others must be doing this too.
I bought some chips from Genna and we kept in contact. I bought a few more from him and we traded some.I got a lot of my chips at scrap yards from opening old computers and from stores that sold old computer parts and boards for $0.50 a pound. When CPU World came online it was great to have all the collectors to trade with and to see what they collected. I have around 1400 CPU / MCU`s so far.I still got to the recyclers once a week to look.

Happy New Year

John

[metalmaker]

I have only been collecting for about six months - so the hobby is still growing. Started out doing gold recovery from electronic scrap (thus my user name) and began saving the cool looking stuff. I am now more interested in collecting chips than doing gold recovery at home. My interest is mainly gold chips and some historical chips as well as hybrid IC's. I was a coin collector as a young boy into young adulthood. What I really like about chip collecting at this point is that there is still some remarkable stuff out there at reasonable prices if you search hard or even free if you can intecept equipment being discarded. So there is a lot more fun for me in the process of collecting than just coming up with the cash. For me, the challenge of coin collecting became an issue of being willing to spend the cash.

Metalmaker

[Did2a]

I had about 10 Intel and Motorola CPU in 1995, I was keeping them as records from my old computers ( I still have some vintage motherboards ). In 2002, I decided to collect them seriously, but because of my location in a small island, I had to do strategical choice.
- Have an Web presentation of my collection.
- Be ready to spend $ 250 / month on Ebay.
So, my collection was really started in November 2002.

Desideriu
( http://cpu-museu.net )

[gmphillips3]

I started collecting chips back around 2000. Was actually looking on EBAY for a Pentium Processor for a parts box I was building and saw were someone had listed a old Pentium processor as "rare".

It had never occured to me that a CPU could be "rare" so just out of curiosity I did a search on CPU and RARE and came with several pages of hits, one that caught my attention said something like "P4004 - Worlds 1st Microprocessor".

I thought it might be cool to have the 1st microprocessor, may be I could frame it and hang it up on the wall in my office. When I started programming, the IBM PC had just come out and I never even thought about what had preceeded the 8088. Anyway, I bid something like $25
on the P4004 having no idea what it was worth.

That would have been plenty for a normal P4004, but it just so happened that the P4004 I bid on, was an early one with no date code. As best I recall, it brought over $200.00. I was stunned that an old chip like that could be worth over $200.00 so I did a search to see if there were anymore P4004's listed on EBAY and was surprised to see that Steve E.
had one for sale with a but it now of something like $19.95. WHAT A DEAL I thought! I just saw one of these sell for over $200.00!!! So I bought it. I asked Steve why he was selling it so cheap since I just just seen what looked like the same chip bring over $200.00 and he of course explained to me the P4004 without a date code was very rare. I was also surprised to learn that people actually collected old chips and that there were even a few web sites about vintage microchips.

While I was not into old machines, I did enjoy building PC's (high-end gaming machines) and since I make my living programming computers,
I decided that chip collecting might be interesting. The only problem was I didn't know anything about vintage microchips. No problem I thought.
Surely there's a book on chip collecting that lists all the chips and their
collector values. I'll just buy the book:). After all, there are collectors guides for collecting everything. PEZ dispensers, blow torches, spark plugs, you name it, there's a collectors guide for it. When I found out there was no collectors guide for vintage microchips, It occured to me,
what better way to learn about vintage chips than to write a collectors guide!

I figured it shoudn't be that difficult. I would just go to the different
chip makers web sites and get all the old data sheets and part numbers,
then watch EBAY and see what the old chips were selling for, put it all in a guide, and be done with it.

If it was could have only been that easy...

[gmanbc]

Hi!
<p>
I started collecting while I owned a computer shop right outside of Fort Leonard Wood a little over two years ago. I initially was pulling the chips out of old junk computers and putting them in a box and then I decided it would be cool to put these on the wall. So I built a shadow box and put what was then about 30 CPUs in it and placed it on display in my shop. It made for a great conversation piece and I had a lot of people donating their old hardware so I could add it to my collection.
<p>
It wasn't until I got orders to move to Korea and I had to sell my shop that I knew that anyone else collected chips. The CPU-Zone was the first site I found and it made quite an impression on me, and that was the beginning of the end… I think the oldest chip I had at that time was a 386 and I had never even heard of a 4004 but within 6 months I had seen every site on the internet and had put together an extensive want list.
<p>
As Metalmaker points out, a lot of the chips can be found with out you spending too much money and because collecting is just now starting to become popular you can be one of the world’s biggest collectors in a very short time of collecting. You may not catch up to chip68 but you can be in the top 100 almost as soon as you pull together a couple of chips.
<p>
Gennadiy don’t lock this thread, I am playing nice

Lee
gmanbc

[wepwawet]

I started in 1999, when my company put a lot of old equipment to the waste - does anybody remember the Y2K-panic?
The interesting working machines and CPUs from the rest was my begin.

[popo]

For me just one year.
Since 2003 Setember.
And my first cpu is Intel Pentium-60.
Good start?

Nice to meet you guys.

[chip68]

Wow, you guys are all newbies, then.

Anybody here collect non-Intel/AMD, non-CPU/RAM/ROM/etc.? Especially pre-1970? That's where the collector's market is heading right now.

- CMW

[CPUShack]

I started in about 1997 or so, with over 100 old 486 chips.

My site went up in 2000

[Borris70]

I started collecting old chips in mai 2002. before i collected old computers, but they needed to much space in our flat (but i still own about 30 old computers).

my first contact to another collector was 1 month later grampas website. he also gave me for free some (at this time in my opinion) very rare chips:
ST 486DX-40
ST 486DX2-66
AMD 5x86-P75 (entspricht 486DX5-133)
AMD Am486DX4-100SV8B
AMD Am 486DX4-120SV8B
IBM 486-V580GA Blue Lightning DX2
iPentium-S 75

his only condition was, that i start my own website. thanks again, grampa

now i have about 1200 different chips and getting new chips for my collection becomes more and more difficult.