Re: Past Blast - "Wonder Woman 1984" - Corp Guy Using PET

On 4/6/25 1:35 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2025-04-06, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
 

    The only place I see 8" floppies now is on eBay.
    The drive UNITS ... forget it. I remember Shugart
    drives ... you put in the disk and it went "clunk"
    as you locked down the door  :-)

 I remember them going "clunk" each time the heads loaded.
There was a diskette duplicator program that would read
a sector, write a sector, one sector at a time.  Clunk,
clunk, clunk...  It took *forever*, and put a lot of wear
and tear on the drives.  I wrote a version that would read
an entire track at a time, step to the next track, start
reading at the sector that was just coming under the head,
and continue until memory was full, then dump it all out
to the destination drive the same way.  It would duplicate
a single-sided 8-inch disk in 36 seconds.

   Decided improvement.
   Alas it didn't take much to use up all RAM back
   in the day.
   Hmm ... should I put my old DEC-formatted 8" flops
   in like an argon-filled glass case or something, as
   unique historical artifacts ?
   DID do a wiring nightmare to xfer the DATA on them
   over to an original IBM-PC ... somewhere I have an
   old photo of that. Serial-port hack  :-)

    Odd historical note ... AC Clarke wrote the "2010"
    script on a K2, sent it in from Sri Lanka by
    acoustic modem (300 baud max fer sure)  :-)

 I remember sending a 50K file to someone at 300 baud.
It took half an hour.  How times have changed...

   Remember the 300 baud BBS universe ? You could
   literally read the text AS it came in  :-)
   I DO remember slower than 300 baud ... wow ....
   how times have changed !