5MB HDD - 1956 style!!!!

[Hoonigan]

I watched something last night, can't remember what it was, and on one bit of it, there was a program that transmitted software at the end of the program.. It was some kind of really old form of "The Gadget Show" from the 80's.

Was that a hoax or actual genuine software? I can't imagine people genuinely recorded that software, and then used it, did they?

[Saracen]

I watched something last night, can't remember what it was, and on one bit of it, there was a program that transmitted software at the end of the program.. It was some kind of really old form of "The Gadget Show" from the 80's.

Was that a hoax or actual genuine software? I can't imagine people genuinely recorded that software, and then used it, did they?

You'd be surprised what people used to do. Remember that things were very different back then. Unrecognisably so, in fact.

Those playing around with computers in the early days often entered programs by typing them in. I've lost track of how many times I've done that. Even if it was only a few hundred lines, it too serious time to do it. A large proportion of those early computer users didn't have any disk storage at all, and that includes not having floppy disk drives. Not only were the drives expensive, but so were the blank disks, by which I mean a couple of hundred quid for a floppy disk drive. I remember buying a box of ten 1.44MB (IIRC) floppies for a Mac and the box was £40. And that was years after those early days.

So, what a lot of people did was type in programs, and record them to audio cassettes, then loading a program would consist of playing the audio tape and letting it load that way. Then doing it again and again until you got it to actually work.

I never recorded off-air programs like that, but that;s largely because I went straight to an Apple II with a disk drive, but vast numbers of people with early machines like BBC Micros, Commodores etc., got programs by buying magazines and typing in source code, and, yes, even recording them off TV.

As I said, they were different days. If you mentioned a computer at home, most people eyes would glaze over, and they'd assume you were some sad, anti-social geek that didn't have an actual life (often, not an inaccurate assumption, either), or they'd be looking around for the men in white coats, because computers were multi-million pound things used by banks, not something people had in their homes!

Oh, and of course, having a computer with no non-volatile storage meant .... every time you turned it off, you lost everything on it. To get something back on it, well, there's the keyboard and there's the cassette deck. So, no viruses. No internet either, for that matter. If you were an advanced user, you had a modem which, if you were lucky, did 1200 character per second. My first "Quattro" modem did (IIRC) 1200cps, 2400cps, a split rate 1200/75 cps and one I can't even remember, probably 300cps. Even having upgraded a few years later to a 14.4kcps job (and that was a £1000 modem, and no, I didn't get the wrong number of zeros in that, I meant a thousand quid for a modem) it still took forever to do anything non-trivial. I remember a PR department (and yes, Corel Corp, I mean you ) sending me an email and the dozy idiots attached their Press Release in four different formats, each file being a couple of MB. It took over 2 hours, on a pay-by-the-minute dial-up to download the flaming thing, before I could get ANY other emails. Grrrr.

Anyone reading this that's young enough to have been brought up in the computer-literate broadband era is probably reading this thinking I'm talking about the 1950s, or 1850s, but no, I'm talking about the 1980 and 90s. When I said things were unrecognisably different, I really meant it. And I'm on about times less than 30 years ago.

[Flibb]

A great addition to having no storage was that many people were on 50p meters for electiricity. When the power went off you lost whatever you had typed in.

Zx81 owner here, did have a modem for the c64 though