Last year I bought some md cartridges from a chap who's late brother had purchased a huge amount of them years ago. He appears to have hoped to sell them with his own software on them, but it never got off the ground and they'd all been sitting around since then. Having been very impressed with the quality of them after using some for my own messing around with BBQL's, I did a deal and bought the rest he had a couple of weeks ago. I knew that an offer of virtually new - or at least, never retailed - md carts was not likely to happen again and I have a strange aversion to them!
They came in boxes of 200, like this:
I suspect that's how they were originally moved around back in the day, as all of them are in exceptional condition and they all have v1.X of one of the 4 Psion titles on them (Quill, Abacus, Archive or Easel) and have had their write protect tabs removed. They've never had any stickers on them and were obviously never sold (or rather, included with QL's). From Quill doc correspondence on other (used) carts I can see that the original owner bought 3,000 cartridges plus 200 plain Sinclair branded cases from some kind of wholesale clearance firm, which has long since ceased to exist.
The sponge pads had all perished, but fortunately they seem to have been stored in an environment that has facilitated removal of the pad - i.e. they come off in one piece and require very little scraping or isopropanol etc to get the residue off. So I've been re-felting them in batches, formatting them and offering them for sale (with a reminder that to write to them you need to stick something on the write protect gap). So far I've sold about 160, mainly in Europe (as I'm in Germany) and (touch wood) I've had no reports of dodgy ones yet. In fact, even just with re-felting, from nearly all of them I am still able to load the Psion v1 software and a "format ram1_mdv1" almost always results in perfect files with no asterix suffixes.
I know that md carts are a relic of early QL days and that they haven't really been relied upon for serious storage for decades, but if you want one or a few re-felted, formatted (6 times) and checked mdv cartridges in as-close-to-NOS as you'll find in 2020, drop me a line!
£4 each to QLforum members (all re-felted and checked). Discounts for more than 4. Postage at cost (which is very reasonable from here to any European address - £3 for up to 500g). I can send them worldwide.
Once they're gone, they're gone, as they say.
As an aside, just out of interest, who wrote the Psion software on the cartridges back in the day? Did Sinclair simply duplicate the software onto the cartridges, package them up and include them in the box with the QL's or did they send carts to Psion to write the software and then return them? I wonder if anyone has any insight on the logistics. I remember reading somewhere that Sinclair were the only people with the equipment to duplicate carts en masse at the time.
