[vcf-midatlantic] AOL 4.0 on Ebay

[Bill Degnan]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 3:10 PM Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic <
vcf-midatlantic at 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.

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