27 Sep
2005
27 Sep
'05
3:07 p.m.
On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:
Way back when I still was using an Imsai 8080 with Diablo daisywheel (directly driven by a
dual-parallel port interface--not a serial one) and a Beehive Superbee editing terminal, I
stored my data on a digital cassette tape drive (it allowed for speeds of up to 2400 bps
and was block-addressable). It wasn't a disk, but it did allow me to edit documents
on a page-by-page basis. You loaded a page into the Superbee, did your editing and then
hit "transmit" to send the edited data back to the CPU. I suspect I could have
done away with the CPU entirely! WYSWYG and no WordStar.
Seems to me that, although they had floppy drives, the old CPT word processors worked
exactly like this. The disks were organized by document number and page; you edited
things page by page.
It worked and was a lot faster to use than the punched-card setup I used on the
mainframe.
Cheers,
Chuck
Then again, could you do useful word-processing
work on a cassette-based
machine? Anyone who use Atari 8-bit, C64, etc. -- was this common? I
assume
that you'd load the wordprocessor via tape,
then run the machine without
powering down and save your work(s) to a blank tape... but I don't
remember
that as being common; I remember disks being much
more common and
practical.