Current vintage Thinkpad prices vs other brands

[Unknown_K]

Is it me or do vintage Gateway, Toshiba, Compaq, etc models of the 90's and early 00's cost more then the equivalent Thinkpad these days?

[ThinkDan]

I haven't checked, but are they rarer because ThinkPads survive longer? If you consider 386/486/586 stuff up to the mid/late 1990's then IBM machines were bought in large numbers by corporations, whereas the competitors seemed to have made lesser inroads into the market place. Then again, my perspective was skewed as an IBMer and then working for a few large IBM customers.

The early Compaq notebooks of 386 vintage were reasonably robust, but their late 1990's stuff wasn't. I remember Toshibas being good at the time but can't think of any obvious models now. Gateway in Europe was just cheap and cheerful, so I'd expect them to be very rare now.