Gone extinct

On 04/29/2012 01:50 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: If the discussion is focused on home computers, then I wonder if the typical* use for "productivity" software wasn't along the lines of: "turn the machine on, do some stuff, save, forget" - i.e. the sequential nature of tape storage wasn't a big issue, because needing to search for something that had been previously stored (certainly at somewhere other than BOT) wasn't really _that_ common. * not that there weren't people doing bigger and better things, obviously, but I think they were probably in the minority, with the majority playing games, typing a few short documents, doing home accounts etc. I remember that tapes were cheap and plentiful enough that I rarely stored more than one file on each. Wasteful, yes, but I knew that my file was at the start of the tape and I didn't have to spend time searching for it. My modern home PC boots up, loads a wordprocessor and lets me start typing a document about as fast as my Spectrum with cassette-based storage in 1982 did; the modern system will do so much more, but quite often I find that it's so much more that I don't really need. In the office it was doubtless a different story, and floppies (or hard disks) were accepted - and were useful - much sooner, but I'm not sure that the retention of tape really had much of an impact on the home market until floppy drives became *really* cheap. cheers Jules