On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 3:10 PM Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
The AOL 4.0 CD ebay auction referenced, has a starting bid of $575, and one bidder. That bidder has ZERO rating and bidding history only 6 days old. I smell a RAT!.
That was my point thank you very much. I was being facetious when going on about other even higher-priced AOL media, a bit of creative license.
An ebay search for AOL CD's sold recently (months) shows most selling for several dollars to under $20, or in sets at those prices. There's stories years old on the Web, about this or that AOL CD or floppy selling for thousands; but not much since 2015.
Now, that's just a modest and incomplete survey, looks over about an hour of time. But I'm not seeing any comprehensive collector's discussions and marketplaces. For items worth thousands, I'd expect to see more. In any event, there's no clear and obvious venue to determine likely value. That makes it hard to sustain interest in high prices, when you can't validate what you have (or are about to) spend.
I imagine someone might tell me "blah blah blah, put it on eBay and take what you can get, what someone pays is what it's worth". I don't find that a satisfactory explanation, that's called "the greater fool". If there's any persistant value to AOL disks or CD's, I'd expect to find something - or have someone tell me "go *here* and see for your self".
Herb Johnson lesser fool
Futher, I personally have saved just about every ISP media that came to me, in a cheese box until that overflowed. I find that I have a pretty nice little history of these disks from as far back as AOL 3.5 disk and others. x