[jchcollins]

Maybe a mundane subject, but does anyone know approx. when toploaders became a thing in the hobby? I was thinking early 1980's, but interestingly enough, the term at least was not a thing in 1985 issues of Krause's Baseball Cards Magazine. Plastic sheets and pages seemed to be all the rage back then.

I guess because patents only last for 20 years, this is also proving difficult to research on Google. I started collecting at age 9 in 1986 and only know that toploaders were around then, or at least very shortly thereafter.

Thanks for any info. I sometimes go down rabbit holes with related card subjects, yes even supplies. While Google has revealed a wealth of information on One Touches and even penny sleeves, similar information on toploaders has proved elusive to me so far. I did see on the Cardboard Gold website that Card Savers have supposedly been around since the were introduced at the 1987 National, for whatever that is worth...