4 Aug
2011
4 Aug
'11
2:04 p.m.
On 4 Aug 2011 at 19:30, Tony Duell wrote:
Reminds me of the tremrinal emiulator ROM for th
HP9830, whcih allowed
you to transfer a file between the 9830's memory and the communcation
link and to store/retrieve it from an HP9830 tape. HP advertised this
as being able to save on timesharing system storage charges.
When I had an Altair 8800 box and no disk drives, I used a 2-cassette
tape paper-tape emulator (one drive could read/search; the other
could read/write/ and search). I believe it was a unit by Techtran.
I also had a Beehive SuperBee terminal that could be put into page
editing mode. And I had a modem from a TI Silent 700. I'd dial into
work as a terminal, write my program code to the tape unit, then go
offline. I'd swap tapes, read the data in a page at a time into the
Beehive, edit it, then write it to the other tape. Later, I'd stream
the edited text back to the mainframe at work.
Some of the early word processors (e.g. CPT) worked this way also,
just with floppy disks. You'd edit a page at a time, then send it
back to the CPU for writing.
--Chuck