19 Feb
1998
19 Feb
'98
2:23 a.m.
;-) Clearing the snow from my glasses, I saw Zane H. Healy typed:
Sam Ismail sayeth this:
>Well, I always knew the 1541 drive sucked egregiously, speed wise. I
>mean, it was as bad as a cassette player...what was the point? Until fast
Not even close. Trust me, I got my Vic 20 in 1981, and
used it with a
cassette recorder until 1986. It took almost 5 minutes to load a 8k
program using the cassette! I'd have killed for a 1541 back then. I knew
people with the C64 and 1541, and boy was I envious at how fast they could
load stuff, and how much RAM they had to play with.
Uh, Zane?
Methinks Sam is comparing the 1541 to non-Commie tape based machines. A
buddy of mine had a full-bore C64 system - CPU, 2 drives, printer, games.
(Played a lot of Zork on that box! ;-) Meanwhile, I had my Tandy CoCo2 with
a $2.00 GE Computer Data portable cassette deck, and we had a race, Commie
disk vs. CoCo Tape. Same program size (just a buncha Basic DATA statements)
and the Commie won by a nose -- 3 or 4% faster than tape.
[[ of course, the CoCos had the ability to be overclocked with a POKE, so I
sped 'er up to a whopping 1.78MHz and issued the pokes to allow the
cassette port to work at that speed, and thoroughly trounced the C64 -- my
buddy never heard the end of it! ;-) ]]
Ever see the 'Plotter' they had? The paper was
a roll like is used in cash
registers, and it had 4 miniature ball point pens. Now that was a lame
printer.
Why is that lame? I have my Atari 1020 printer (dang-near same as the RS
CGP-115) which works very well, and believe it or not, the pens & carriage
are the same used in the printer attachment for the RS Pocket Computer 2 --
now that was kewl! That machine helped get me thru college. Rather
innovative to be able to cram a 4 color plotter into your pocket (granted,
a big pocket...)
Keep computing,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger Merchberger | If at first you don't succeed,
Owner, MerchWare | nuclear warhead disarmament should
zmerch(a)northernway.net | *not* be your first career choice.