This is probably the place to start.

Pick out one or two computers or accessories -- ones that you have duplicates of, ones that maybe you are least attached to, and sell them. Don't spend too long on this -- try to pick something out in a couple days or a week at most, even if you can't go through your entire collection to find the most disposable item in that time. Try to sell the item briskly; don't spend months trying to find the perfect collector, just get it done.

Then see how you feel.

If you got rid of your entire collection at once, it would be an insurmountable challenge to put it back together. But if you sold a half a dozen and then couldn't bear it, reacquiring them becomes an achievable goal.

At least find the time to open the boxes and document what you've got and whether it works. Ideally you'd find somewhere to put the cream of your collection - a cheap display/book case with glass doors doesn't take up too much room and an area nearby with a monitor/tv would mean it would be easier to play with them.

If you have a working Amiga 1000 or Apple 2 do you need another? Selling duplicates might fund purchases of different machines.

If there are any collectors or hoarders here, Please heed this warning.

Eventually you won't be around to take care of your collection. It will eventually be passed down to someone who doesn't want it, and wants to get rid of it.

My dad is a hoarder. There is tons of junk, but there are a few gems mixed in. The problem is, once I inherit it, I have no idea what's actually valuable because it's mixed in with a lot of junk. I cannot research each individual item.

If something is not clearly labeled as valuable, or on a list of valuable items, then it will be lost forever. In my case, my dad has actual junk and trash, I will be renting a dumpster, and something that someone else might want to collect and be willing to pay a high price for, will inevitably get thrown away and lost for good.

If you are a collector or hoarder, and you care about your items, make sure the most valuable ones are identifiable by whomever inherits it.

(I will try to reach out to other collectors before getting rid off stuff, but there is so much junk, they might miss things as well.)

(Not my joke)

Then there are "estate sale" people. They sell the things that are worth money, and give you have of what they make. They keep the other half as their fee.

The problem is if you have to do both - if there's massive amounts of actual trash, but also a fair amount of good stuff. But at least we had some ideas of what categories of things probably included good stuff, so we didn't let the hoarder cleanup people take those.

The way I have dealt with it is with a few principles:

1. Emulation for the ones taking up the most space and also with the least power. I sold my Commodore 64 collection. 2. Get rid of games in favor of flash carts. Compatibility via using original hardware. 3. For buying a new system, it better have something cool I missed out on. After all, my collecting started because I felt like I missed out on a lot of things. Example: 3DO is a system which makes little sense to buy.

I also have a real passion for analog televisions and radios. I have too many of those too.

What doesn't fit in there should belong to someone else's collection.

I'm in the exact same boat except with retro gaming instead of retro computing. Personally I recommend giving away whatever you can to somebody who you think will really care for them. If somebody donated retro gaming stuff to me I'd cherish it for life. Some people would take stuff and just flip it to somebody who probably just wants it because it's trendy right now and will throw it away when they get bored. Part of my emotional attachment is to physically owning the stuff, but part of the attachment is to the thing itself and wanting it to be cherished the way I cherish it.

One thing that would definitely help is pulling back on future acquisitions. Now that we have jobs and our own money, unlike when we were children, it's easy to keep accumulating. But if you can find a way to re-evaluate what really brings you value now, vs what brought you value as a kid, that might tackle your problem from a different angle (preventing future stuff vs dealing with current stuff). As an example, now I'm really into data hoarding and console modding, which allows me to play games on most consoles from HDD/SD card/USB/etc. As a result, physical games are not quite as impactful to me as physical hardware like controllers or consoles, so I still go for hardware if I see it but I'm much more picky about what games I acquire now.

I decided to have a change in my career, so I closed this office I had with my friend, and we had to decide what to do with it. We donated all to a local computer museum. Now I have this mantra, If I have some hobby stuff I have not used for three years, I donate it. Donated my Xbox360 and my playstation3 recently.

Sometimes I get caught by nostalgia, like last week when I was looking at a appleII clear case mod, and I get a small urge to buy another one. Then I just remember how good was that time, and that good memories are never the same when you live them again.

Now I use the money and time I would spend with a collection in many ephemeral hobbies. The current are electronic projects, laser cutting and Kitesurf.

Sometimes I'm overcome by nostalgia as well, especially when people lauding the Amiga for which I have a weak spot, as I couldn't afford it back in its heyday. Then I look at some youtube clip of an Amiga game and think, yep, that's how it was, doesn't look all that impressive today and I'm cured again for a couple of weeks ;-)

If you decide to sell; I am interested.

I lend you the computer

You borrow the computer from me

https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/retro-game-museum-in-uk...

It would be great if collectors like you teamed up to recreate a new and even more exhaustive one.

  > Here in Australia there's not much in the way of technology museums.

AFAIR it's not exactly "consoles in display cases" like at powerhouse, but they probably don't have the kit

Prepping them for sale will be real work; which you sound like you have enough of already. If you believe their value to be high and it turns out no one will bid anything like that much on them, you may become discouraged and more attached to them.

It may be worth turning of the stack of "to be disposed of" to someone else for selling or etc and ignoring the details as they can only lead to distress.

And best case, you get a few $K for it? Probably not worth it.

That's maybe a cynical take on things but it's the conclusion I've come to.

If the alternatives are keep it all (undesirable because of space use, etc), sell it yourself (undesirable because of time use and disappointment), dumping it (undesirable because it's good stuff), or letting someone else sell it... Well you're not going to get the monetary value of the collection, but at least it's probably going to someone willing to pay for it... And hopefully they don't let it sit in boxes forever.

Maybe think of it as curating or collating your collection?

There may be museums that would take your items, and you can be sure that they'll be cared for correctly by experts.

Probably not.

Museums and archives have vast collections that are never displayed. The Computer History Museum in Boston closed quite a few years ago and AFAIK, the majority of their collection has never seen the light of day since. It costs a lot of money to display and care for vintage equipment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Museum,_Boston#...

Though a day may come where I might find life is at the right point to create a little computer museum. Maybe.

Roughly speaking, I am sifting large piles into several categories: somewhat contemporary stuff I can donate to a charity who might resell/reuse at least some of it; e-waste and metal I "donate" to a licensed scrapper for proper disposal; batteries and other items I separate and hand over to the county's household hazardous waste handler; recyclable paper and plastic; recordable media I have to at least attempt to erase before figuring out disposal as per above; and landfill for whatever is left.

Because he had no inventory, and hoarding seems to be an almost fractal disorder, I feel obligated to carefully sift and break down every item until all hiding places are revealed. I cannot predict when I will come across something in the midst which requires special handling. I wish I had found piles already sorted, so I could have just done the back-breaking work of shifting them out of the house in one heroic push. Instead, I have been forced to become intimate with it all. Now, I have an involuntary hobby to do this a little bit each week, filling the curbside bins and taking the occasional car load to other disposal sites.

I have had to remind myself not to "cry over spilled milk" and dwell on the sunk cost of all the unnecessary things he hoarded. It's hard to say how much that money (properly invested) could have gone to supporting his care and quality of life in the end. But it is all a liability to me now, as attempting to recover any value from it would take more of my time and cause more grief than it is possibly worth.

They might ask you some leading questions on how you might work towards making that museum a reality now, instead of some nebulous future, or how you might come to accept that a computer museum is an unrealistic goal. I'm not saying that either of those things are "right". I'm just some punter on the internet who is making assumptions based on his own problems with hoarding (VR headsets and hobby project materials, in my case). The therapist will help you work through what you really, truly, want out of your life and create the sounding board and accountability to make you admit why you're avoiding it.

I got super overwhelmed with the search for a therapist. My health insurance had a provider search form online and when I used it, it came up with 3000 hits in a 5 mile radius around my house. That was ridiculous. I eventually realized that there actually was no way to make a decision on a therapist just from reading profiles on the internet. So I found local healthcare centers that had a lot of therapists on staff, looked up reviews for them, and called the center that had the most positive reviews. They then helped me schedule my first appointment with my therapist, because fitting your schedule is probably more important than finding exactly the right person the first time.

I'm somewhat considering changing to a different therapist, but I achieved a much more important thing: I got started, and I got into the system that can make it very easy to switch.

Cutting to the chase, I ended up giving away a few systems and recycled the rest. It was very difficult for me to do since I had an emotional attachment to a couple of the systems, as well as the idea of some day getting around to playing with them. In the end (after regretting the decision in the short term) I can say that I don't really think about it anymore, and the burden of storing all that stuff is no longer an issue.

I had a C-64 at one point with a disk drive and a bunch of disks. I could buy a C-64 and a drive for it and games for it, but it wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't be the disk drive that broke over and over and that I somehow took apart and fixed without knowing anything about how to fix a disk drive. And it wouldn't be the collection of games that I played in 1982, some of which I remember and some of which I've forgotten, and it wouldn't have some of the first software I ever tried to write, or the games I typed in line by line from magazines. And it wouldn't have the games that I would crack so that my name came up as the author on the startup screen.

Same thing with the Apple ][ my step-dad had that I used to use. He has no idea where it went, he thought I had it. I could buy an Apple ][ but I can't buy my old Apple ][.

I regret losing all of that stuff, computers, books, music, collectibles, any of it that I had a personal connection to. I have no idea what happened to Rosebud.

If it's just stuff you bought as part of a collection and you don't really have a connection to it, then don't worry about it. Sell it for what you can get, take half of the proceeds to spend now, throw the other half in the stock market and if you want to build a collection again 20 years from now you'll have some cash.

Add to that, you should check the condition of the equipment regularly. If you have zero days per year for that, you'll be very sad if you try to turn on that Apple 2 in a decade or two. But you already know that. OTOH if you have half a Saturday per month, you can probably open up and visually inspect at least 20 machines per year; if you have the know-how, maybe pick one to repair. Doesn't matter if you do it over a weekend or over two years. If you have a room for storage, outfit it with a desk for your current repair project - good lightning, scopes, soldering station, good note taking (important when rarely working on it), decent part bins.

She had decided to donate the machines to those who would find a use for them, that being old co-workers and student organizations at nearby universities, the latter including me. Who would keep them running and in use instead of just collecting dust.

We actually have a guy who still uses an Amiga at his current job spitting out code and whatnot which is quite cool. :-)

I moved country a few years ago and in doing so got rid of the majority of my possessions - at roughly the same time as clearing my late parents' house and getting rid of most of their posessions. It was all much more hurried than I would have liked, but even so, it's somewhat freeing to not have the responsibility for so much ... stuff ... anymore.

Amongst the things I got rid of were all the 'projects' that I had never started. Getting rid of those and accepting that they weren't going to happen was the most freeing of all.

I still have plenty of stuff and unstarted projects, but the overall burden is so much less.

Finally, I'll note that I think most of the 70s, 80s, and 90s microcomputers that are not especially esoteric now are going to remain available at somewhat reasonable prices during our lifetimes.

Just my 2 cents from a fellow pack-rat.

Many collectors end up shopkeeps as a retirement hobby.

There's a million caveats here -- you need to live somewhere that has enough people to visit your shop, you need to be financially secure enough to sink some money into renting a storefront, you need to be able to spend time in your shop on a regular basis, and you shouldn't expect your shop to actually make money.

But if you like collecting more than having a shop gives you a space and an excuse to putter around with your collection, repairing, maintaining, and displaying it while selling and occasionally buying new pieces. There are any number of antique shops or used bookstores that started from someone who retired with a large collection.

I don't really have an answer for you, but I can at least commiserate with you on this point. I also never had the money for a computer in the late 1970's and 1980's, and I've likewise been going back and trying to acquire some of the things I always wanted. I bought an Atari 800 on Ebay about a year ago... and have not even bothered unboxing it. So yeah, I kinda feel your pain. And yet, despite having no practical need for any of this stuff, I fully expect I will also add an Atari 1040stf to the collection at some point.

With a collection or emotional attachment this is a bit more of a grey area. Ultimately, you should look for a way to reduce the stress of a move and spread it out over time. i.e. sell the things you don't "need" or can easily replace once you have moved or move them ahead of the move with some form of moveable storage.

Once you have decided to part with something it might also be worth it to know if it could be donated to someone that will use it. It is worth pondering but not stressing over. The benefits of giving something meaningful should never be overlooked. If you don't know what I mean then try it.

What I mean is that do you want to be the kind of collector that has two singed Apple II's?

Or the kind of collector that has a signed Apple II?

Or the kind of collector that once had a signed Apple II, but moved it on because it no longer fits within the collection?

There's nothing wrong with any of those.

Except perhaps in so far as choosing one path that makes you unhappy.

Because your hobby should not make you unhappy (I won't go as far as saying it should make you happy).

Now is the perfect time to think about this because moving house is a bit of a reboot on how we identify ourselves...if for no other reason than "now I live in Omaha."

Good luck

> I don't have anywhere nice to display them

That seems like a good goal, then: find somewhere nice to display them.

My grandpa got into an O-scale train collecting kick in his retirement, and inadvertently stumbled upon someone in a very similar predicament to you, except with trains and train paraphernalia instead of computers. This guy had (and still has!) multiple model train layouts in multiple scales, countless other toy trains from throughout the last century or so, a bunch of actual railroad equipment and signals and such, random collectibles from when he worked for Western Pacific, you name it. Well, he needed money so he started selling some of his stuff, but he and my grandpa got to talking and realized that it was a sufficiently-large collection of museum-quality pieces to, well, start a museum.

Said man happens to live in the same town as my uncle (my grandpa's brother), and said town (technically a "city", but it's your stereotypical American small town) had a museum in an old church that was (IIRC) at this point condemned as structurally unsound. The "city", meanwhile, also needed a new town hall, and the local senior center wanted to move its thrift store to a new location.

This train collector's newfound desire to "loan" a large chunk of his collection to the museum was the last push needed for the city council to go ahead and bite the bullet on a new "city center": they bought the town's old middle school, and my grandparents, my uncle, the train collector, the museum curator, myself, and a couple other locals all pitched in to clean out and renovate the building, and we ended up with a pretty nice (by middle-of-nowhere standards) "City Center", a solid quarter of which consists almost entirely of just this train collector's stuff (including an O-scale approximate portrayal of the town). Place is still proudly up and running (I still maintain the website and head out every couple months to run "sudo zypper ref && sudo zypper dup" on the museum's desktop), and it's still expanding, with a G-scale outdoor layout under construction.

I guess that story's a roundabout suggestion that you should start a museum (or find an existing one) in your own town. That way, a lot more people than just yourself will get to enjoy what you've collected, and there will be ample local motivation to keep your collection both intact and in working order even when you're no longer either of those things ;)

I recently sold my collection of video games and video game consoles I collected since a kid. Many of those things were worth a pretty penny and also gave someone else the enjoyment that I already had experienced.

While I could save them for my kids or play them on a rainy day, I decided to make peace with getting rid of them and I haven't looked back since. I used to consider myself a low-key hoarder and this was one of the tendencies of keeping stuff I never would use.

I’m sure many of us understand this. I grew up always on the last gen console because we couldn’t afford the latest 8-bit or 16-bit machines.

As an adult, I started buying boxed versions of those consoles in large part to collect but also to get that experience I missed out on as a kid.

I collected classic video games for a while. After a while, I realized I'd be happier if I focused on one area (Atari). Eventually, I wasn't playing or displaying the consoles or games, so I got rid of all of it except for one nice 2800 console and a couple of the funnest games which I wanted to show my kids.

Somebody else got to enjoy the stuff that was just sitting in my boxes. No regrets.

Don't keep crap you don't need or don't expect to ever use, especially if you don't have space for it. Find a computer museum/tech center/someone who appreciates old computers and donate them. If you can't find that, well, it's time to call your garbage disposal company to schedule an extra pickup.

Take a full inventory of what you have. Then move into making a decision.

There will be regrets about selling some things. But it’s possibly better to have those regrets to focus you on what you really wanted.

It’s like trying to find and buy a CRT TV these days. Utterly impossible.

I decided to keep and focus only on vintage computers that (nearly) fit in a shoebox, so now I have a much smaller collection by volume but about the same number of systems, like Atari Lynx, Tandy Model 100, Sinclair ZX 81, Poqet PC… Much easier to display and move!

Also, I'm a collector, so let me know if you want to sell any of them. In particular, don't have an Amiga and always wanted one.

But if money is not super-important, there is always https://www.homecomputermuseum.nl/

I sometimes regret selling the 500.

Many of us have let gear go only to really regret it later. And we've also let gear go that needed to go and feel good about it being used by someone too. I found myself getting out of SGI, for example. That was hard, but in the end, the right thing for me to do. I will probably never get rid of my Apple //e. I did let my Color Computer 3 go, because someone else was super into it. YMMV

So, it's very likely to be a mix for you.

Split the baby!

Keep a few things, and maybe a spare or two if you have that, and unload the rest.

One thing to keep in mind is we are moving through what may be the last wave of access to original hardware at reasonable prices. It's gonna start getting really rare from here. May take another decade, but it's really going to happen.

When it does, people will have what they have and getting more, or replacing it with originals is going to be out of reach, or just not possible, depending.

Now, the good news?

We are also moving through a great time!! New stuff is being made with FPGA devices. These will look and feel like the originals and in most cases will work with original peripherals and all that too. Chances are that thing you really wanted to work with may be available in some form that is satisfying to do the work on.

A note on emulation: It's getting really good.

I have moved to developing on emulation and then running on real hardware and or gaming / having select experiences on real hardware where it counts.

An example of the former: Any kind of programming is great in an emulator. It's fast, we can use modern tools and the whole nine. You won't need new hardware for most things. People have decided they don't need real hardware too. Others have not gotten there yet. May never.

Say you want to play a game or see your creation "as it were", say on a cool CRT, or at a known clock speed, or that pushes the original in some new, or right on the edge way. You are gonna want the real deal.

And on hardware development: Now is a great time to be developing add on hardware. Some of these machines are active on that front today. It's cool, and something I want to do personally. Other machines are kind of dead, or there just aren't that many interested, whatever. Point is if you are into hardware dev, you may want an original.

Hope this helps. My comment is a combination of my own experiences along with others who enjoy old gear in various ways.