MEMORY CHIP

The year was 1986 and Bud Ballos was an eighth-grader, a proud owner of a brand-new computer with what was to him “a weird thing” called a mouse.

Remember the Apple II? It was a fixture – in the library, next to the card-catalogue filing cabinet – in many a middle school beginning in the 1980s.

“This was the start of the new computer, and at the time, I didn’t really know what it was,” Ballos says of his very first desktop, its screen no bigger than 7 inches by 5 inches, its color off-white, the kind of plastic that starts to yellow after a while. Not too many families actually had a computer at home then. “I thought it was cool. My friends thought it was cool. We’d look at it and go, ‘Wow, all right.’ “

Ballos, now 33 and called Thomas rather than Bud, is a novice collector and a random one at that: coins from the United States and Canada, belt plates from the Civil War, Native American spearheads and arrowheads. They’re all in the garage of his suburban Washington home, where the showpiece – “I did my homework on it; I played Donkey Kong on it; I brought it with me to college,” he explains – is his Apple IIc.

These days people are holding on to their old desktops and laptops – for nostalgia’s sake, for the kitsch value – turning yesteryear’s outmoded computers into today’s historic artifacts, giving them a growing value in the ever-so-hungry collectibles market.

From an early 1975 Altair 8800, named after a planet in a “Star Trek” episode, to a 1981 IBM Personal Computer that a young Bill Gates helped develop, the collectibles menu covers a broadening taste. Pepe Tozzo, author of the upcoming book “Retro Electro: Collecting Technology From Atari to Walkman,” puts the price of the Altair, depending on its condition, between $930 and $2,785. That’s chump change compared with the $72,000 that Lot 238 – the eight-page typed “Outline of Plans for Development of Electronic Computers,” written in 1946 and regarded as the “founding document of the computer industry” – brought at Christie’s in New York in February.

Ten years ago, the mantra was that old computers were worthless. Today even casual collectors spend a great deal of time shopping and researching online. There’s Classic Tech (www.classictechpub.com) and the Obsolete Technology Website (www.oldcomputers.net), to name just two sites and of course there’s eBay, where on any given day dozens of vintage IBMs, Ataris, Amigas, Apples and Commodores are up for bidding.

On a recent day, with 4 days 7 hours left on a listing, the top bid for an IMSAI 8080 microcomputer circa 1977 – Matthew Broderick, in the 1983 film “War Games,” almost started global thermonuclear war with one – is $1,025. “I built it from kit and used for several years,” writes the eBay seller. The bid started at $450.

Tony Romando, editor in chief of Sync, the men’s magazine for the gadget-obsessed, says there’s a one-word reason why people collect old hard- and software: cool.

“Who keeps an Apple II laying around? The hipster who owns a Treo cell and a PowerBook G4 and an iPod but last month went out and bought a rotary phone for his living room and sometimes walks around with a Walkman for street cred,” says Romando. He keeps his circa-1999 iBook – the one that looks like a toilet seat – in the basement, next to one of those tiki lamps that repel mosquitoes. “Nobody’s buying these old computers for the technology. They’re buying it for style. For a lot of people it’s artwork.”

Sync runs a column in which a resident expert prices readers’ electronic treasures. To the reader who asked about “a box full of Bell & Howell Apple II dinosaurs,” Sync suggested that instead of cashing in for an estimated $300 (“with appropriate manuals”), he should hang on: “You never know when that Mac-crazed hottie from work is going to drop by for drinks. You’ll score with this super-hip antique on your desk.”

Apart from the hipness factor, Michael Nadeau, author of “Collectible Microcomputers,” a field guide of sorts, says holding on to a vintage computer is about reminiscing about the personal-computing past.

“If you grew up in the late ‘70s, for example, and you used this computer, the computer meant something to you,” says Nadeau, who has a soft spot for Radio Shack TRS-80s, affectionately known as Trash 80s. “I think cars make for a good analogy: If you grew up in the ‘70s, the Corvettes, the Mustangs, the Camaros meant something to you. Maybe you didn’t own one of those cars, but you wish you had.”

For uber-collector Sellam Ismail, storing his more than 2,000 computers in a 4,500-square-foot warehouse in Livermore, Calif., is akin to storing history. He owns Commodore 64s, one of the most popular computers of the 1980s; every member of the Apple II family; and a PDP-8, a rare creation from the now-defunct manufacturing giant Digital Equipment Corp.

“It’s worth at least $20,000,” he says of his PDP-8, considered by many to be the first “minicomputer” – meaning it didn’t fill an entire small room – of the 1960s.

“Everything is happening so fast – computers that are only 20 years old are completely outmoded, and even today computers that are only five years old are considered outdated, ” says Ismail, a self-described “computer archivist” who seems to keep every detail of every computer ever built in memory, and that’s not an exaggeration. In computer circles he’s known as the proprietor of the world’s largest collection of privately owned computers. He organizes the Vintage Computer Festival, held regularly in Mountain View, Calif., since 1997. Three years later, the first European festival was held in Munich, and the inaugural Midwest Vintage Computer Festival at Purdue University in Indiana will take place July 30.

For Ismail, computers from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s – the way they looked, the way they were built – were much more interesting.

“Most of the PCs that have come up in the past 15 years, there’s nothing special or interesting about them. It’s the same box, no matter from what manufacturer,” Ismail says. “What computer collectors tend to focus on are computers that are unique – you get to play with architecture that’s completely foreign from what you’re used to.”

The Holy Grail of any serious collector is the first in the Apple line, the Apple I, designed by the Steves – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak – and sold in 1976 for the superstitious price tag of $666.66. It even has its own fan club; the Apple I Owners Club was born in 1977, the same year production of Apple I’s was discontinued.

“There were 200 made in total,” says Ismail. “I’ve tracked down 35 so far.”

In the past five years, during the festival in Mountain View, Apple I’s have been up for bidding three times. One sold for $16,000 in 2003, Ismail says.

The Apple IIc (the “c,” by the way, stood for “compact”) is not as scarce as the Apple I – some 400,000 were produced the first year it came out. If Ballos sold his, he said, he was unsure how much it would fetch.

Ismail estimates the Apple, with all original materials, would sell for no more than $300; author Nadeau puts it at a more modest $200.

For now, it seems, the Apple IIc that Ballos got for Christmas in 1986 is still a tad too young to be worth real money.