So you found a beige box.

I follow a number of retrocomputing communities and there is a brand of post that crops up almost daily that I must confess rather grinds my gears, if unfairly.

It is always from someone new to the group, who drops in with a picture of another generic beige PC, and a question that is some variant of asking if the group can "identify" it.

It's mostly the repetition that annoys me, but there is also usually some undercurrent or unspoken question, or even flatly stated question of "and how much can I scalp it for on eBay."

But mainly, it is annoying because there is only ever one answer, one that could probably live in a pinned post on every retro community that attracts these posts:

No we can't, and probably nothing.

Now, I realize that in many cases the people asking this question aren't likely to know this; if they know anything at all about the vintage computer market, it's some vague idea that "old computer" suddenly became a thing that was worth money in the last ten years or so, so they're hoping they just pulled an Antiques Roadshow.

They didn't.

They almost never will.

In fact, unless your beige box says Apple or Commodore or Amiga on it, it is almost certainly worth nothing to no one.

And this is where I think most normal people go wrong: we have officially crossed a weird threshold with the PC where people have forgotten that computers used to be sold without Brands™.

Pretty much from the moment Compaq cracked the clone market, to round about the late 2000s, pretty much anybody could just open a shop and start cranking out PCs. You got a catalog from a supplier and you ordered a bunch of generic parts, slapped it together, and sold it to whatever punter happened to walk in the door. If you wanted to get really fancy, maybe you even whipped up some custom badge stickers to put on the front and make it look all official.

Dell actually got its start doing just that, but so did truly thousands of companies big and small all over the country, from big corporations down to tiny little mom and pop shops. All you needed was a phone and a little startup capital. Michael Dell was supposedly selling them out of his dorm room when he first got started.

The margins weren't amazing but you could still generally build the machines for cheaper than you could buying and reselling them from an OEM, make a bit of a profit on the hardware, and then keep making money over the years after from upgrades and repair work for those customers. That's how small independent computer stores survived through the 80s and 90s.

But capitalism does what it does, and eventually a few players get big enough that they can negotiate directly on sales with parts manufacturers or even start building their own parts, and thus be able to pump out machines at prices no mom and pop shop could get on their own.

By the end of the 00s, these kinds of bespoke hand-built PCs just can't compete, and building your own PC mostly becomes the domain of the enthusiast market, where you can still eke out a few bucks in savings going to Fry's or Newegg, or else the OEMs just don't sell anything beefy enough to do what you need.

Your average home commodity PC that just needed to run IE and Word, well there stops being much sense in buying anything but whatever brand is on sale at Wal-mart or Best Buy, and shit like Geek Squad starts swallowing up the repair market, so the mom and pop shops die off.

In time, people seem to have largely forgotten that there was a time when your Windows PC didn't necessarily come from a big brand, and so those people come across a mystery beige box and think they've hit paydirt on some obscure forgotten relic of the 90s, when the reality is they've found the equivalent of that one coffee table your dad put together in his garage whose legs were never quite straight.

There are truly millions of these things out there, most of which ended up in landfills or e-waste recyclers, but plenty still survive in closets and attics and store rooms all over the world at this point.

The vast majority are also worthless; built to a bargain for moms and grandads alike to be able to balance their checkbooks or log into AOL and little else, and then just got treated as disposable when technology finally outpaced it and it wasn't good for much except scrap.

Many of them don't even work, because commodity level boards were known for cutting corners on parts like batteries and capacitors, which can over time just pop like a nasty acid filled grape and start eating the board and destroying other components.

Hardcore enthusiasts, the ones whose machines would likely have the kind of hardware that retro collectors actually want, were also far more likely to hold onto that hardware thereafter, and the high-end hardware they want was also sold in far fewer numbers.

So the odds you've found the jackpot are honestly pretty small, which is why yes, you do sometimes see beige boxes on eBay for stupid prices, but you're more likely to see good money going for the parts. Try shopping for a Gravis Ultrasound sometime: that's the shit collectors want.

Which brings me to another common question: No we do not know what "model" this is. Unless it has a familiar brand name like IBM or Dell or Compaq, chances are high it never even had a specific model name or number, and almost certainly the specs aren't documented anywhere. Even on name brand machines from companies like Dell or Micron or Packard Bell, they pumped out so many of these things over the years, with sometimes multiple updates a year, that even if we can find the model number, it might tell us nothing.

The bottom line is that when it comes to any given beige box, unless its one of a small handful of famous early models, an exterior or even interior picture means almost nothing to any of us, and it would require opening up the machine and inspecting and testing parts, and sometimes even that might not be enough for us to identify everything inside, to say nothing of having any hope of getting it working.

Your best bet, at the end of the day, is to put it up on Facebook or craigslist for 50 bucks and hope a local collector with a soft spot for these old dinosaurs snaps it up because they need the spare parts.

So please, please: stop with the posts, and support your local nerds instead. I'm sorry to disappoint you.