I've had a standing eBay alert for the preferred 2nd. Edition CD going for around eight years, at this point. Over that period time, there may have been innumerable false alarms, with one or two valid auctions that the alert pointed me to, which I missed due to having been away at the time and finding out too late. Some years back, I did contact a couple of the book and CD dealers listed in the XyList OED treatise, but they only seemed to still offer the much later editions. Rather hard to find the *old* CDs. This is exactly the sort of item you could luck into, if you stumbled across the right garage sale. But good luck with that.
I even contacted a list member off-list, to inquire about the possibility of duplicating a CD. This is a type of favor I have done for others in the past, when there is no good or ready alternative. Anyway, as I told that list member, I completely understood if -- as in that particular case -- there were ethical qualms about doing this. It's not as though I had some aversion to purchasing the CD, if any of those dealers actually had the version I was looking for. But, at the same time, this is not something I regard as being important enough to justify spending hundreds of dollars on.
More recently, I located what purports to be the sought after edition of OED (?), but someone has used tools to convert it to DICT format. (Yeah, that format was a new one to me as well.) The claim is that this will make it much more accessible than the original ever was, free of the former limitations, etc. Other (but free) software is then required to access it. However, I doubt that would equate to a similar access by Xy. Maybe this is not really much of a problem, given the multi-tasking we now take for granted on latter day computers ? For sure, it would be nice to simply jettison the maze of install and access issues detailed in the XyList treatise. Otherwise, I'm wondering if some reverse tools may exist, for taking DICT format files back to their original CD incarnation ? Some internet searching on that topic has not turned up anything, yet.
Jordan