I recently added a Commodore 1581 3.5" floppy disk drive to my collection. Being interested in the history of my new toy, I wondered what I might learn from it's serial number. After some Googling without much success, I found an excellent video on YouTube produced by "8-Bit Show And Tell" that uses the German Tank problem to try and work out how many drives were produced.
The video features various photos of the bottom of the drive submitted by viewers (to create a dataset). The video was popular enough with 1581 owners that the author has created an actual spreadsheet of known and "verified" serial numbers.
However, my drive differs from all the submitted pictures in two unique ways.
First, my drive does not have a serial number printed on the label, but instead it has a small paper sticker next to the label with what appears to be the digits 049? (the ? is unreadable and worn away).
Second, my drive has REFURBISHED BY COMMODORE literally melted into the bottom of the drive.
Here is a picture:
This has only increased my curiosity. Googling has been useless, so if anyone has any first hand knowledge of when, or under what circumstances Commodore would 'refurbish' a disk drive I would love to learn more.
