Re: Verizon to Buy Alltel

On Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:29:51 +0000, Larry <noone@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

The Ghost of General Lee <ghost@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:0atja49gq2h4nv0308fs6iou6759ekcrlc@xxxxxxx:

Funny, I made a bunch of money off the thing (at least from the
perspective of a then 14 year old) by writing customized software for
a personnel agency on the old Model 1 w/ three 180K diskette drives.



Only the insane or fabulously wealthy could afford a disk drive....

He wasn't hurting for cash, especially after he started running the
software I wrote for him. He used to clear $1,500-$2,000/mo. in
placement commissions (back in 1978-79), but the month after that
system went into service, he cleared $13,000 in a single month. But I
don't believe the drives were horribly expensive. Remember, these
were *diskette* drives, not hard drives.

REAL Model 1 owners, of course, stored things on Genuine Radio Shack
cassette tapes in the handy combo audio and data recorder.

I didn't use cassette tapes on RS equipment. However, we used them on
an Apple IIe system at school, and IIRC, a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A
we had at home.

It really didn't matter much as the disk drive had to read through itself
like a record from start to where the data record was to get it off the
disk. I don't believe it had any kind of fast access method like the fancy
IBM-PC with its FAT tables.

I don't remember that. It seems I recall "record numbers" which
corresponded to physical sectors on the diskette, as long as you used
a record length which was an even divisor of the sector length.
.

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