Re: Apple II vs Atari 800

[Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca>]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, heuser.marcus@freenet.de wrote:

> On Apr 26, 2:36 am, "Russg" <russg...@MUNGEsbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > .4 kb/s  ?  That's 400 bytes /sec or about 4000 bits/sec?
>
> Yes. As Ensor says it's hideous. It's more like a tape recorder
> without the need to spool to the sections to load from.
Of course, that's an actual big step up.  Having to find the start of a 
program on a cassette was as much a problem as the slow loading.  I used
ten minute cassettes, and kept one important program on each (maybe a 
backup later on the tape), but I gather most people used 30 minute or
longer tapes and multiple programs per cassette, making the search issue 
worse.

So having direct access to files with a disk drive actually is a big
improvement.  Slow transfer only counts once you've had something
better.  Which is the same thing with cassettes; I don't recall them
being much of a problem other than finding the start of the program,
but the minute I got a floppy drive in 1984 I never wanted to use
cassettes again for programs.

There was one early commercial floppy drive system, and it was
treated as a faster cassette system.  They didn't bother with
a real operating system, which made it easier to adapt the system
to multiple computer types, so you saved at a specific location on
the floppy, and when loading had to specify where it started (and
maybe ended, I can't remember).  At the time, at least thirty years
ago, it was still better than cassettes.

   Michael

> Without a fast loader you can literally *see* the bytes being
> transfered.
> *With* a fastloader the thing is quite usable.
>
> bye
> Marcus