Author Topic: Why don't computers have "B" drives? (Read 1677 times)

vorticon · « **Reply #30 on:** August 25, 2003, 11:37:41 AM »

had cassette tapes for the c64 to...
i have over 100 360k 5/14 inch disks for my c64...

i cant see why they would start discontinuing the 3.5 floppy

there a hell of a lot easier than cd-r's and there the only thing you can use to transfer old games to your 86-486

DmdMac · « **Reply #31 on:** August 25, 2003, 11:57:49 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by pugg666
Anyone remember the casette drive for the Commodor Vic 20?

It was completely manual.You had to keep a listing of where every program was on the casette and you'd fast forward to where the program was the load it.

I didn't care, I was 8 or 9 at the time, and could play all the games I wanted to.

I had a tape drive system for my Atari 400 and one game on tape: Star Trek. It weighed in at about 34K and took a long time to load.

Most of what I did back then was program in BASIC, and later a derivative of Pascal called Action! which was totally unreliable as a programming language. But I had a means of storing my work and that was key.

AKIron · « **Reply #32 on:** August 25, 2003, 11:59:07 AM »

I had an Atari 400 with tape drive also. Took 10 minutes to load Zaxxon.

Took up collecting old computers a few years ago, have most model atari and commodore machines now.

Wlfgng · « **Reply #33 on:** August 25, 2003, 12:19:01 PM »

paperweights

and yeah, I remember this huge-ass floppies that didn't hold squat..
and the IBM cards.. aaaakkk. . remember getting one out of order ?

Dinger · « **Reply #34 on:** August 25, 2003, 12:39:38 PM »

to the untrained eye it looks like 64 bytes

Yeah, my first computer was a 1979 pet with a cassette deck. Ahh yes...

Hortlund · « **Reply #35 on:** August 25, 2003, 02:24:21 PM »

10 print "Hortlund is cool"
20 goto 10

SFRT - Frenchy · « **Reply #36 on:** August 25, 2003, 02:48:10 PM »

Eskimo, I can see you are not an old timer:D

Skuzzy · « **Reply #37 on:** August 25, 2003, 02:59:07 PM »

Actually Dinger, the punch card held 80bytes of program/data and,.12 bytes for offset information. There were several formats of the punch card over the years, based on which CPU was being loaded.

LePaul · « **Reply #38 on:** August 25, 2003, 03:03:16 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Hortlund
10 print "Hortlund is cool"
20 goto 10

I could be wrong....

10 print "hortlund is a dweeb";
20 goto 10

I *think* that makes it fill the screen horizontally too (maybe comma? dunno)

AKIron · « **Reply #39 on:** August 25, 2003, 03:10:23 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by LePaul
I could be wrong....

10 print "hortlund is a dweeb";
20 goto 10

I *think* that makes it fill the screen horizontally too (maybe comma? dunno)

I bet you guys were filling the screens with your name on those computers sold at department stores 20+ years ago.

Mickey1992 · « **Reply #40 on:** August 25, 2003, 03:17:18 PM »

I had a cassette drive for my TI-99/4A until Santa brought me the expansion box which came with a 5.25 disk drive and an extra 32K of RAM! That box weighed a ton and I was convinced it was built for military use. I think my poor parents (I mean Santa) paid $500 for it.

Unfortunately the interface cable from the CPU to the expansion box was about as think as my shoe.

Hortlund · « **Reply #41 on:** August 25, 2003, 03:17:43 PM »

I remember my first programming attempts on the C64...
I had bought this book where you had a program listed, all you had to do was copy everything. Maybe it was 1500-2000 lines or something like that. The one I chose was "sub commander"

Anyway, I spent most of the day writing all those lines. I cant remember right now how old I was...maybe 10... after a while I realized that there were lots of characters that I didnt know how to type, namely [ and ] so instead I used { and } (or maybe it was ( and ) ...not sure).

Well, as you would suspect the program didnt work at all. Turned out the book I had bought was for the vic20 "computer" and not the C64.

Oh well...I suppose thats why I turned to law instead of computers at the uni...

Dinger · « **Reply #42 on:** August 25, 2003, 03:20:42 PM »

commodore basic:
; = do not append carriage return
, = append tab

Oh yeah
and
rem "^H^H^H
or something like that would allow you to do funky effects with comments while listing. My favorite trick in computer science when they were teaching us to do stuff like sorts would be to write some 2 line program that faked the results in a really fast time, followed by an END, then put a rem afterwards that would make the preceding lines disappear when a general LIST was given, followed by the textbook solution.

The result?
Wow! you got it to bubblesort 1,000 elements in .01 seconds?
Sure, take a look for yourself

Replicant · « **Reply #43 on:** August 25, 2003, 05:15:49 PM »

Commodore 64.... memories, I can still remember the reset code "SYS64738" !!

Wlfgng · « **Reply #44 on:** August 25, 2003, 05:24:35 PM »

now that is a portable computer ! lol