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Home |Changes [Jan 04, 2007]
HomeThe sale on 23rd February was preceded by a trans-America tour of some of the top items and there was considerable buzz around the place with a million dollars the expected result.
In the event the lots, collectively Jeremy Norman's Cyber Library, reached $714,060. One of the top prices was fetched by a document outlining plans for the development of electronic computers - J.Presper Eckert and John Mauchly's 1946 UNIVAC business plan - described as "the founding document of the electronic computer industry".
It just topped its estimate at $72,000, and was bought by Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus. (See interviews with Kapor and Norman for the Computer Collector Newsletter http://www.snarc.net/ccen.html).
Anyway, I asked my friend and leading computer collector Sellam Ismail, back in Silicon Valley, for his thoughts on some of the prices.
"In a word: silly."
Sellam is a guy who has built his 2000 + machine collection out of a teenage hobby, for years hauling away cyber detritis that people would have paid to see removed.
Now a specialist running the bi-coastal Vintage Computer Festival, and with his collection at the core of a thriving tech history business, Sellam is well placed to comment on the impact of technology going arthouse...
"Frankly, I'm amazed they were able to get that much. I think they got 10 times what the items sold were worth. Everything in that auction was way over priced by 4-10 times. That people actually paid that just confirms that some people out there have stupid money.
"Even the Brainiac kit, which comes up on eBay every so often and never gets over $500, sold for $2K+.
"Bottom line, I don't know if this is good or bad for the history of computing. I suppose it's good, in that people apparently think it's worth spending tens of thousands of dollars for seminal papers and such, but on the other hand, this might inspire sellers to start getting really greedy. Probably gone are the days of picking up nice old computer books for a song. And I can't imagine what effect it'll have on 50s-60s era ephemera. My guess is that it'll eventually become out of reach for the average hobbyist collector (sooner than it would have normally taken for this to happen).
I find Sellam's final words, about the acceration of time taken for such artifacts to be out of reach, really interesting. It complements the rate of change for technology as a whole.
Top price of the sale - $78,000 - was fetched by something with antique value in a traditional sense. A manuscript dating from 1842, being "Menabrea Luigi Federico's sketch of the Analytical Engine with notes by the translator, Lord Byron's daughter Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace".
I remember a spooky thing happening to me involving Ada Lovelace. A few years ago, when reading her letters to Charles Babbage in Oxford's Bodleian Library, I was inputting the words when I somehow I hit an errant key - and transported her portrait from my slide file to peer out at me as my screensaver...
