4 Jun
2004
4 Jun
'04
8:43 a.m.
On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 18:18, Fred Cisin wrote:
No, and you don't see people wearing onions around their neck anymore to
ward off illness either.
Man, like many others I used to do edits and huge (sic) compiles and
library building and linking, HOONK HOONK HOONK for hours, every day,
for however long an individual floppy lasted. (1.25MB each, seemed like
a lotta space at the time.) THAT ate up floppies and drives! I put
solidstate relays on the big AC motors and let them run down after some
idle period, that helped.
We used to pay
$80 for a box of DSDD Dysan 8" floppies and align the
disk drives every year with a Dysan alignment diskette and an
oscilloscope. That's what it took for repeatable reliability. It sucked.
... and yet nobody was buying 8" Dysan alignment diskettes and new
shrinkwrapped Dysan floppies at $1 per diskette at VCF! My biggest
market segment was teachers who each wanted ONE diskette to wave in
the air when talking to classes about the days of dinosaurs.