> If that is the case, then this stuff belongs to a museum and not on ebay. 
> IMHO.

Hi Attila ,

I completely understand how you feel, but this happens all the time with niche 
collections. You just can't find a brick and mortar museum interested in taking 
all that inventory. How many people would travel to city X in country Y to see 
a collection of electronics made by company Z? So these collections tend to 
last only as long as the original pioneer behind them is active. Once they are 
gone, there's a good chance that it all ends up on eBay, scattered around the 
globe. At least it doesn't end up in recycling or the trash.

Checking current vs. completed auctions for that seller, you'll note that a 
large number of the good or exotic items have already been sold. I noted that 
high value items like hp rubidium and cesium standards apparently never made it 
to eBay, suggesting some cherry picking occurred before the collection went out 
for bid.

I once thought "HP should have their own museum". But then they split into 
Agilent, then Symmetricom bought out their T&F line, then they became Keysight, 
then Symmetricom became Microsemi. With these companies, there isn't strong 
technical, moral, or business justification to allocate office space and 
resources to host dusty museums that might only attract tens or hundreds of 
people a year. They are rightly focused on current and future products, leaving 
us bottom feeders and nostalgic historians to collect and display the old stuff 
in our own homes, or on the web.

For me the greatest museum loss occurred when "The Time Museum" in Rockford, IL 
closed in 1999. This was the best collection of clocks in the world, 1500 
pieces from an ancient Egyptian water clock to a vintage hydrogen maser and 
everything in between. But the heirs of the founder were not into Time or into 
Museums. So it went to a massive international auction (Sotheby's) and was 
scattered for all of time.

/tvb

_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.

Reply via email to