22 Jun
2004
22 Jun
'04
2:03 a.m.
Great story, Nico.
All I can say is, on that project I did that needed all the overlays,
thank heaven for the Corvus hard drive we had! This thing was a $3000,
10MB(!) drive specially set up for the Atari machines. It was
partitioned internally like a bunch of individual floppy disks so the
Atari file system could deal with it, and the interface was via the
joystick ports on the front of the 400/800 machines! Each port had four
bits of data and another line they used for various control, strobing, etc.
Physically, this drive was huge, as you might imagine for a 1984 unit --
And TEN MEGABYTES! Woo hoo! I thought I was king of the world with
that thing. I rigged a special interface for the drive so that up to 8
Atari machines could use it more or less simultaneously.
At least we didn't have to worry about wearing out floppies!
-Tom
Nico de Jong wrote:
I recognize the situation.
Back in my Philips (one ell, not two) days, I was working on a 32K (8 bit)
mini system for local authorities. Everything was devided in 2K/8bit pages.
The program was so big, that (1) in order to get a 10-20 byte routine, I had
to split up a procedure in two parts (A and B) , where B could then be
called from a procedure C. The reason to call B from C, was that I otherwise
would not have room to end C with a RETURN instruction. Disgusting, but it
teaches you about effective (in the sens of compact) programming.
Another project in the system, had been "undersold" by the representative.
He tought 32K was more then sufficient for RJE, 4-5 tellers, and 1x 3270
simulation. It wasnt. It ran efficiently on 64K, but the customer didnt want
to buy 32 more K. The seller didnt want to admit loose of face, so what we
did, was to implement a disk overlay routine on 8" SSSD floppies. God, it
stank ! The traffic on the floppy was so intense, that we had to replace the
floppy at least once a week. Totally worn out. However, the seller was
happy, as he got his provision from a 32K sale