Rob,
Thanks for the follow up answers and sharing your knowledge! I do think you would have a lot of viewers since this hardware is rare. Again it is a beautiful restoration! You did an amazing job! If I may ask one other question: Do you need to use specific density 8" disks? We have single...
Thank you both for replying and sharing your information!
Rob,
That is awesome! You did an amazing job of restoring the 8280! It looks brand new next to your SuperPET!. May I ask a few follow up questions:
1. What DOS version is in ROM?
2. Is the 8280 8" drives faster than their 5 1/4"...
Has anyone used one of the Commodore 8" 8060 series or the 8280 series of disk drives? I hate to admit this, but I didn't even know Commodore made 8" disk drives until I stumbled upon a drive list for the Pet/CBM series. Fascinated, I tried to do some research, but haven't found much so I...
Thank you all for the information! It has been interesting to read! In the book, Fire in the Valley, they mention that MS Basic was widely pirated and had a copy of Bill Gates' Pirate Letter. May I ask a few more questions:
1. The book said MS Basic was on paper tape, so was paper tape easy to...
Thank you all for the information! I never knew the prices of the hardware and the issues involved. I also never thought about how much memory was left after MS Basic was loaded until CJS pointed out that only ~600 bytes was left. No wonder people had multiple memory cards!
NeXT,
Thanks for the information! I never realized that there were both dram and sram, but I can see why the sram board would have less issues. Do you know, was there a price difference between the sram and dram versions?
Thanks!
Krebizfan,
Thanks for the information! That is really interesting! May I ask a few follow up questions?
In Fire in the Valley they mention that Microsoft Basic was shipped on paper tape and was heavily pirated. Was it easy to copy one paper tape to another or did you have to load it into the...
If you happen to see my other post, I've been reading about the early days of the computer market during the 1970s. The books I've read mention punch cards, paper tape, and audio tapes.
I was wondering which of the three was the most reliable loading programs? My first computer was a...
I've been reading books on the early days of the computer market and many stated the MITS Altair 4k board did not work reliably. Unfortunately, none of them have detailed what that meant. I was wondering if anyone here could explain if there was an issue with MITS 4k board, what it would do (or...
Those of you who used CP/M and then used MS-DOS, I wondered what your opinion on this was? From the books I've read and the interviews I've seen with Tim, I do not think that he copied any CP/M code into QDos. However, Gary Kildall threatened IBM with a lawsuit because QDOS was so close CP/M...
Thanks for the clarification! I appreciate the insight offered by everyone. Alank2 raised an interesting question about the expectation of compatibility at the time. I assumed that users would expect to share data between people/machines, but that comes from growing up in the 80s and 90s. Did...
I never used CP/M back in the day, but have read a lot about it and its creator Gary Kildall. It seemed like a nice OS for the time, but if I understand CP/M correctly, it did not have a standard disk format? As in each OEM could use their own format for storing the OS and data. For those of you...