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Where do you guys get parts?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I'm looking daily on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, but it's insane how things go fast on there! I'm on a few Facebook groups as well. I feel like I'd have to monitor them 24/7. And when you do find interesting stuff, it's not within range. It's like there's a big invisible and competitive market for old computers.
A lot of the issue is there's not really as much old hardware out there as you might think.
Nobody kept their old computers safe once they upgraded, they got sold cheap or trashed or whatever. There was never really a time when old computer hardware had a lot of retained value over maybe a year or two from its release because stuff moved so fast that things got obsoleted rapidly and the value hit essentially zero within a reasonably short time.
And a LOT of what's out there doesn't work because, well, working for 20 or 30 or 40 years was never part of any design decision for any computer - if you got 5 years out of it was a good run.
Worse, there are entire generations of hardware that flat-out fail - the capacitor plague, for example.
Basically, nobody 35 years ago thought there would be a time with an IBM 5150 would be valuable, so very few people bothered to keep them when they upgraded.