DB-19 Has Landed!

[bigmessowires]

Some of you have been following my frantic search to locate more male DB-19 connectors, used to mate with the Mac's external floppy port for Floppy Emu. These things were last manufactured around 1990, and since then the small remaining demand has been slowly draining the surplus warehouses that still have them. Last month, the supply at the few big warehouses that still had them all went to zero, and it became virtually impossible to buy them anywhere. Since then, I've been digging under every rock from San Jose to Skopje to Kuala Lumpur to find these things. And when I find some, I buy them ALL. I even got a friend of a friend to hand carry some connectors from Malaysia to California for me! After two weeks of furious hunting, this is the result:



581 male DB-19 connectors. I can say with pretty high confidence that this is the largest remaining stockpile of DB-19's in the world.

So the great DB-19 panic of 2015 is over, but it will probably be followed by the panic of 2016 when these run out. Hopefully I'll figure out a new solution before then!

 

[unity]

Wow!

Glad you got some, had me worried!

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

So if we want a FloppyEmu or two, order now?

 

[bigmessowires]

You've still got some time. I sell about 1 board per day, on average, so that gives you an idea how long 581 will last.

 

[uniserver]

so on average how much did you have to pay per DB 19?

 

[NJRoadfan]

1990? Apple was still selling products with that connector for a few years after that. Must have been a heck of a surplus.

 

[bigmessowires]

Some of them were free! As a result of the previous screw-up where the assembly place destroyed 100 DB-19 connectors, before we knew they were so rare. Overall average cost was around $1. I located about 100 others that I didn't buy, because they were more like $5 each.

1990 might be a little off. I think the last Mac that had an external floppy port was the IIsi, or maybe the Classic II. Both were discontinued in 1993.