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I'm a little late to this party, but i will throw in my two cents.
Back in the 90's with computers and computer hardware, you couldn't keeep anything in stock. The gold rush was the windows 95 internet era, roughly 95-98. Anything, and i do mean anything with a modem in it, would be out the door in five seconds. And i had some good chinese and california connections. You couldn't keep systems and parts in stock. This was the infancy of ebay. With my connections, the chinese had flooded the market with motherboards. 486, socket 7 pentium and of course the early intel "server board, socket 8 or pentium pro. Due to the price of the chip, socket 8 boards could be bought new in bulk pack for $8. Yes, $8. The se would FLY off ebay for $35. I'm talking 75-100 a week. Socket 7 boards, you could double your money on ($20 cost)
This was a time when on the ebay US site, only 500 auctions were listed in the motherboard category. enormous demand was not being met, anything computer flew off the shelves on ebay. The post office started sending me out to the loading dock.
This was largely the transition from DOS screens to windows 3.1 to the early net. The internet was white hot. On systems, you could make anywhere from $50-150 gross profit on a machine u may have had 20 minutes of time with.
The funny part, or not so funny part depending on how u look at it were those finacial rapists at aol. They had oversold capacity on the jersey shore to the extent that when you called your local dial up number, u couldn't get in. Busy signal. I remember an obnoxious secretary we had in our department who had been on AOL back when those thieves charged an hourly rate.
Then, prices on new systems started to drop, $2000, then 1500, then 1200, then 900 and so on. Many years later after i had gotten out, i checked ebay and saw 50,000+ auctions for motherboards. Many, many sellers were buying from my connections, selling the item for cost or less, and then overcharging on shipping.
Back door discontinued slightly out of date items at huge discounts could not be found. Became impossible to find a deal u could make any money on.
The irony of all of this, is vintage hardware went up in value. Stuff u couldn't give away back then, went up in value. At one point, very early on, i had bought maybe 200 very early NEW 386sx16 motherboards for i think $1.50 each. Today on ebay, i bet they would sell for $45-50 each. I think the early computer parts and systems have already become the roundies of computer hardware.
Vendors of every type went under. Those strip mall computer stores, all gone. I guess the same as tv repair places and mom and pop video rentals.
Me, i stumbled onto something else.
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