It’s been roughly a year since I turned a personal electronics project into a retrocomputing mini-business, which makes now a good time for a short review. When I started dabbling in floppy disk emulators for vintage Macintosh computers, I never would have guessed there would be other people out there who wanted one of their own. It’s been an interesting adventure!

After selling a few prototypes on eBay, and giving away a few boards as gifts, the first real sale was board S/N #0008 on December 9, 2013. Since then I’ve made 223 Floppy Emu boards, sold 182, junked 4 that had defects revealed in testing, replaced 2 that had problems during the warranty period, and have 35 in inventory (aka my floor).

The first 123 boards were built by hand, one at a time, one component at a time. There’s not a lot to say about that experience except that it sucked, and I inhaled a lot of leaded solder fumes. Of those 123, there were 3 with major defects that had to be junked, and 4 more that only worked at 400K/800K disk speeds and were sold at a discount. Since serial number #0121, all boards are now professionally assembled by Microsystems Development Technologies in San Jose, CA. That’s helped improve the quality, and restore my sanity. Of the 55 boards from Microsystems that I’ve tested thus far, only one has had a defect.

Initially, all Floppy Emus were sold with a built-in DB-19 floppy connector, so the board could be plugged directly into a Mac’s rear floppy port. I later introduced a version with the DB-19 on a 3 foot extension cable instead of soldered directly to the board, and that’s proven to be very popular. Since mid-August when I lowered the price of the extension connector model by a few bucks, it has outsold the built-in connector model by 4:1. At some point I’ll probably drop the model with the built-in connector, and standardize on the extension connector model for all sales.

Cases for Floppy Emu have only been available for a short while, but they’ve been well-received. The attachment rate for cases (percent of people buying a board who also buy a case) has been 83%, much higher than I’d expected. And despite my predictions, the brown hardboard case has been much more popular than the clear acrylic case. I’ve already sold out of the hardboard cases, and just placed an order today to manufacture more.

About 50 percent of sales have been to the United States, which isn’t too surprising since that’s where I am. Australia, Canada, and the UK have also all seen significant sales. No sales to Africa or Antarctica yet, but all the other continents are represented.

Shipping has gone smoothly, even internationally. I’ve only had one shipment (to New Zealand) that never reached the buyer.

My order handling and fulfillment process is still horribly inefficient, but there aren’t enough sales to justify a big investment in streamlining things. Between manually testing each board on a Mac 512K and a Mac IIsi, downloading Paypal order details, fighting the post office web site to print electronic postage, generating sales receipts, wrapping boards, packing boxes, and driving to the post office, there’s about 30 minutes of labor time required for every single sale. Then there are often post-sale questions, which require additional support time. It’s not exactly a low-overhead business.

I’m excited to see what year 2 will hold for Floppy Emu. Thanks for coming along for the ride!