PDP CDROMS - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

29 Jul 1999

John Foust wrote:
...
 At 10:31 PM 7/28/99 -0400, William Donzelli wrote:
>
>You may not have to think about trying to sell every last CD pressed. A 
>few years back, a friend had 500 CDs made (the pressing of the disks, 
>jewel cases, and full color insert/back) for something like $1100. The 
>price may have gone down since then. At $15/each, it would not take long 
>to get back the original investment. 
And these are pretty much the costs today (they'll be a bit less if
I have real plain-jane artwork and no insert.)  The real question is
whether I can sell them in the required volume.

...
 It's that kind of thinking that leads to stock
rooms full of 
CDs you can't sell fast enough, like the one I had in the basement
until I unloaded them at a price that barely covered the cost
of my investment. 
See, I'm not *trying* to make more than my investment; I'm just trying
to get the PDP-11 freeware archives into the hands of everyone that
can use them.  (If any folks deduce that I'm obsessive about collecting
and distributing this stuff, from the fact that I've been building
the PDP-11 freeware archives for most of a decade now, largely from
scrounged and discarded 9-tracks, 8" floppies, and disk packs, they're
probably correct.  When one of my former employers tossed ten thousand 9-tracks
they'd accumulated over a few decades, I literally spent an entire night
in the dumpster with a flashlight trying to rescue what DECUS and other
freeware that I could.)

...
 For heaven's sake, CD-Rs make much more sense.  If
your CD-R fails,
get another copy from Tim or someone else. 
Real pressed CD-ROM's *almost* make sense: The cost for getting a glass
master made is about $750, and getting a few hundred CD-ROM's
pressed from this is only about a buck a piece.  Plain black artwork
on the surface adds another $100 or so to the price.  Divide the
$1000 cost up 80 ways or so, and a $15 target price becomes reasonable.

Seeing as how the collection is going to occupy at least 2 CD-ROM's,
and probably more (especially if I want to satisfy folks who want ODS-1 format
CD-ROM RSX Sig tape collections, which is *inifinitely* convenient for
folks with a CD-ROM drive on their PDP-11 RSX box - I can't tell you how neat
it is to be able to put a collection of hundreds of 9-tracks, spanning
three different decades, onto a CD-ROM and have them all completely
accessible on the -11 instantly!), I'm looking at $2000-$3000 just to
get the glass masters made for pressing "a set".

Gold CD-R's look to be the next best thing, and I can run those off fairly
reliably in small volumes.  What I'm tempted to do is take the income
...
 from CD-R's, and let that accumulate until it makes
economic sense to get glass master(s) made.  At that point, everyone who got a Gold
CD-R
will magically get an honest-to-goodness CD-ROM.  Does this sound like
the "best of both worlds"?  Folks would be welcome to buy multiple Gold
CD-R's of the same volume if they wanted to speed the process up a bit :-).

-- 
 Tim Shoppa                        Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com
 Trailing Edge Technology          WWW:   http://www.trailing-edge.com/
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