The only reason I have any of this stuff, is I scrounged before it became popular. I picked up an Imsai 8080 with disk drives and a DECwriter II terminal for 5 dollars at a flea market. (welcome to silicon valley LOL!)
Wow, when was that?
I keep thinking about the technology that is considered junk today - 5" floppies, PC ATs, MS Windows 3.11, software from the early '90s, early books about the Internet, 2400 baud dial-up modems - and I have saved a couple examples of some of those - but there's not much that evokes a passion in me. OTOH, even now, Windows 1.0 is scarce & expensive on eBay! That would be very cool to have. If we came across one of those, we'd buy an early IBM PC XT just to run it on as a display piece.
Maybe early (analog) cellphones will become collectors' items. Or the earliest digital cameras, which I'm sure must be starting to appear at yard sales by now. I need something small, that won't threaten to take over a whole room if the collection grows large. :-)
Speaking of collecting, I've noticed that quantity has a quality all its own: My mom used to save a plate block of every first-class stamp that came out. But when I looked up the prices years later, I realized that everybody & their brother was probably doing the same thing, the values were so low. Only the large-denomination stamps have increased in value over the years. Which makes sense when you think about it: Very few people felt they could afford to collect a block or sheet of every $1.00 stamp that came out. But those would be the (only) ones to collect if you wanted something that would end up a rare prize.
I guess it's kind of like that for you few, intrepid guys who have saved minicomputers or mainframes from the trash heap, as opposed to all those people who have boxed away their early microcomputers or saved a pile of 8" diskettes.