On Fri, 7 Jun 2013, Sean Fahey wrote:
I still have the bill for the first box of 10 floppy disks I bought, in 1984, it's just under fifty dollars here in Canada. Of course, that was name brand, "Elephant" if I remember. I admit I was worried, so I didn't buy the outright cheapest, though I can't remember if generic floppies were out there yet.On Friday, June 7, 2013 8:28:00 AM UTC-5, schmidtd wrote:That's right... the original mechanism specification only required movement through 35 tracks; I've had early floppy media with some characteristics like smaller access windows and smaller writable area that would not allow head movement through 40 tracks. Time passed, and media and mechanisms all supported 40 tracks - but OSes on the Apple II side never expanded to take advantage of it.Diskettes finally got cheap enough that only the stingiest of users cared about cramming as much data as possible on them. Later on, everyone I knew who ever used 40 tracks to backup their hard drives ended up regretting it eventually.I recall my first 3 disks cost me a months allowance and chore money. I'm kinda glad I wasn't old enough to start dating yet or I'd have been using cassettes for a few more years. Girlfriends were even more expensive.
It bugged me that I'd just bought a floppy disk drive and controller, and they hadn't bothered tossing in a blank floppy so I could get going right away. I seem to recall buying a pack of 2 floppy disks first, so I had something until I spent more money.
I'd say capacity was an issue. With my Radio Shack COlor Computer, I found a single 360K floppy a tad small. I was running Microware OS-9, and I found I had to make multiple boot disks, have the operating system on more than one disk, and then say games added to one, development added to another, writing to another. I forget exactly, but the operating system ("unix-like") took up enough space that I had to trim in order to add other things. And then the second floppy drive, when I got it (at a much ower price than the first one), was used for my own files, like text and assembler files.
I well remember when I got a 3.5" floppy drive, wham double the capacity. So I could put everything I wanted on one disk, OS-9 and the C Compiler and the text editing stuff. It was suddenly "like a hard drive", large enough that I didn't hve to change disks.
What a different world it was. Michael