Hacker News Reader

My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying normal 3.5" disks, stamping holes in them and selling them as pristine 3.5" HD disks. Let's just say it was less successful than I'd hoped.

View on HN

My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying up used floppies for pennies slapping a blank label on them and selling them for $1 a piece. But I was a pushover so most people could bargain me down to $2-3 for a pack of five.

I did this on an Acorn Archimedes disk and though okay at first, the floppy got corrupted after a few days. Bad idea!

The Archimedes would format any floppy to any density, so you didn't need the hole punch.

My point was that formatting a 800kb disk to 1600kb (as you could on the Archimedes) is likely to - and in my experience has - corrupt after a few days of use, and thus is not worth the amount of money saved.

Luckily it was just copied games that got corrupted, but it could have been worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com