• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here
  • From now on we will require that a prefix is set for any items in the sales area. We have created regions and locations for this. We also require that you select a delivery option before posting your listing. This will hopefully help us streamline the things that get listed for sales here and help local people better advertise their items, especially for local only sales. New sales rules are also coming, so stay tuned.

Value of 720kb Floppies

Stone said:
You should read the *entire* post before commenting.

$1 each = $10/box of TEN which is clearly what the post you truncated and the previous post by k2x4b524[ mentioned. Jeez Juul!
@ $10/box of ten the individual price = $1.
@ $2.50/box of ten the individual price = $.25

BTW, how does 'someone who doesn't have an internet connection with Google on it' get to eBay to even know this???

Math & reading lesson over. :)
Click to expand...

My "math" is acceptable and my understanding of English is very good. I adhere to the Fowlers as best as I can - yes both of them. Heart's Rules is always close at hand, and I heartily recommend Strunk and White which, if you are American, is probably already in your library. Yes, English is my second language but I didn't learn it in the street, nor from television. At this point I've been speaking and writing it for 54 years. Certainly I don't claim to be perfect, nor wish to be, but there is no need to be rude. :)

Regarding "an internet connection with Google on it", that is a literary device and if it doesn't mean anything to you, then don't worry about it. I didn't mean to confuse you, but I'm sorry if I did.

This thread, however, is about the price of floppies. Here is your original post, verbatim:
Stone:

On the high end they seem to be in the $9 - $10 range on eBay.

On the low end I've been selling them for $2.50.

The prices above are for new, sealed boxes of ten.
Click to expand...
I see now that you were working directly off the previous post without quoting it. That is not the *entire* post. If the non-parallel structure within your post was deliberate and intended as a literary device I apologise for not "getting it". :) So, we're not talking about a unit price in packages of ten, but rather the total price. That is indeed very good and I would have no problem recommending you as a source.
 
Ole Juul said:
I see now that you were working directly off the previous post without quoting it. That is not the *entire* post. If the non-parallel structure within your post was deliberate and intended as a literary device I apologise for not "getting it". :) So, we're not talking about a unit price in packages of ten, but rather the total price. That is indeed very good and I would have no problem recommending you as a source.
Click to expand...
Sorry, sorry, sorry, without rehashing the details, sorry. But, I now see we're on the same page. :) And, that's always good.
 
k2x4b524[ said:
Curiosity, what would the value of the genuine article be these days?
Click to expand...

If you need 720KB floppies let me know: I picked up hundreds of floppies yesterday with quite a number of DDs. I will charge USPS media mail shipping only.​
 
Last edited by a moderator:
k2x4b524[ said:
Peter, i'm asking because i've got THOUSANDS of the little buggers, i've worn out 2 floppy drives formatting them all...
Click to expand...

Did you ever consider looking for one of those formatting robots? With some luck you should be able to find one somewhere in Asia. I remember pre-formatted discs were produced that way.

At any rate: I have had some luck in selling floppies through eBay in the past. Obviously you do not get rich but it is a nice way of sending them off into a new destination.​
 
Last edited by a moderator:
PeterNY said:
At any rate: I have had some luck in selling floppies through eBay in the past. Obviously you do not get rich but it is a nice way of sending them off into a new destination.
Click to expand...

I remember computer show vendors selling bundles of America Online signup disks for use as blank floppies. If you could get AOL to send you them in bulk, I'm sure this was a lucrative little operation, back when a package of blank floppies still had some demand and value.
 
PeterNY said:
Did you ever consider looking for one of those formatting robots? With some luck you should be able to find one somewhere in Asia. I remember pre-formatted discs were produced that way.
Click to expand...

But head wear would still be a constant, even if the robots ran at 2x, 4x or 8x speeds. Where would one get replacement parts for the drive mechs?

You might look for an old program of mine, FORMATQM. It's a stick-the-disk-in-any-drive and formatting begins automatically. If you have a secondary controller(s), you can increase the number of attached drives to about 12. It also supports 2X speed drives.

We also offered a higher-powered program that could format up to 3 720K simultaneously, but it required Compaticard IV adapters with configurable port, DMA and IRQ. (3 was the limit because there are no additional 8-bit DMA ports available).
 
vwestlife said:
I remember computer show vendors selling bundles of America Online signup disks for use as blank floppies. If you could get AOL to send you them in bulk, I'm sure this was a lucrative little operation, back when a package of blank floppies still had some demand and value.
Click to expand...
There's still some 'demand and value'. Several people are selling them individually on eBay for $.50 to $1.00 each if I remember correctly. I think this was even mentioned earlier in this thread. And they're selling a few at those prices.
 
Yes, demo floppies were handy and provided a great supplement for poor computerists like me. When everybody changed to giving out CDs there was no longer any point in going to COMDEX. :D
 
well i don't think i'm going to go get a disk-robot, ive got about 30 floppy drives of the 1.44mb variety, so i'm good, right now i'm using a VERY LOUDE citizen drive, it's on it's 200th disk and is going good, i'd LOVE to get Windows 7 to see my ls-120 on a USB port, then i'd be done by now..
 
Prices have gone up. Six or seven years ago I was selling boxes of 50 new disks for $5 on eBay. These were surplus duplicator disks I'd bought on eBay. 1000 disks was a little more than I was likely to use in my SupersPORT. Those old Citizen drives are picky about using real 720 disks.
 
tomasont said:
Prices have gone up. Six or seven years ago I was selling boxes of 50 new disks for $5 on eBay.
Click to expand...
Oh, I don't know; last time I looked there were still lots of NOS disks out there for less than 10 cents ea. if you knew where to buy. After all, in the 'real' world they're even more useless than HD diskettes are these days.
 
Floppy Drives are dying. may be we need new hardware for replace Floppy Drives.

one of my friend developed, floppy emulator for old computers. it support now only Amiga, Amstrad, Atari and Oric. other computers are planned ...

http://retromaster.wordpress.com/
 
There are many floppy emulators around. Some commercial, some semi-commercial. Here's one that's been around for a few years:

http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html

I think they're also sold on eBay.

I don't know why your friend is re-inventing the wheel. Given the many millions of floppies and drives that were sold, I'm not particularly worried about running out of them, at least in my lifetime.
 
it is hard to find floppies, and most of them not working. if they works today, they will die soon (both drives and floppies). I have lots of computer with faulty drives (amigas, ataris etc.)... you can also easily transfer programs from one computer to another with SD cards. They store millions of disc in a SD card etc. etc. But if you do not like floppy emulators, you still use floppy discs :)

ps. Retromaster is also developing new floppy emulator (cumulus). It aims to emulate the WD177x/WD179x series of floppy disk controller chips (FDC), too. So, in essence, it is aimed towards certain retro-computers that originally came without built-in floppy controllers (e.g. MSX, CPC464, Oric, Spectrum, etc.). Back in the day, to add a floppy drive to these computers, the user had to install/connect a FDC card to the expansion port. Therefore, it is impossible to use a floppy emulator like TFE or UFE with these computers without the appropriate FDC expansion, which can be difficult to obtain.
 
I have drives and disks over 30 years old. They work fine--I don't see them dying anytime soon--indeed, I routinely see 35 year old floppies. Will there be SDHCs 35 years from now? Heaven knows, CF cards are becoming less common than they once were--and many older CF-based devices can't use ones of more than 4GB capacity.

My point is that we may be substituting one obsolescent technology for another. In particular, devices that rely on 5V logic or 1970's technology microcontrollers (such as PIC) have me wondering...
 
Chuck(G) said:
I have drives and disks over 30 years old. They work fine--I don't see them dying anytime soon--indeed, I routinely see 35 year old floppies. Will there be SDHCs 35 years from now? Heaven knows, CF cards are becoming less common than they once were--and many older CF-based devices can't use ones of more than 4GB capacity.
Click to expand...

Floppy disks are a magnetic medium, just like audio and video tapes. There are reel-to-reel tapes from the 1950s that still play as good as the day they were recorded, and cassettes from the 1990s that wore out within a few years. It all depends on the quality of the materials, and the conditions in which the media was stored.

One thing for sure is that I would not trust CD-R or especially CD-RW discs to be a long-term storage medium. Due to the way the data is "burned" onto the disc, the signal strength that the laser picks up is already pretty marginal compared to what a conventional pre-recorded CD or CD-ROM disc puts out, so it's easy for the disc to fall below the level at which the drive can no longer recover error-free data or glitch-free audio.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top