Commodore intended for the 1541 to be reasonably fast, but a bug on the C-64’s circuit board put an end to that. The flaw was correctable but that would have delayed its release. The 1541 transferred data at a rate of about 300 bytes per second. The C-128 and 1571 combination were about 9 times as fast, which was much more competitive with other computers of its day. It wasn’t quite as fast as the 1581, but that’s due to the 1581’s better seek times.
Both the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64’s disk drives’ throughputs were much slower than the Disk II’s 15 KB/s, seriously affecting their ability to compete in the business market.[5
300 bytes/second, but that’s still bad. I’d known that the 1541 was a dog back in the day, based on complaints by C64 owners on the local BBSes. I hadn’t known it was that bad.
Also, there was a Beagle Bros. mod to Apple DOS that they called Pronto-DOS, which greatly sped up the Disk II simply by rearranging the sectors on the tracks to increase the likelihood the next sector will be right there at the next read.
I just want to say before this topic closes that I really enjoy all the Ultima love herein. I immediately recognized the article thumbnail as an Ultima dungeon, and this whole discussion really takes me back
I have some SuperCalc CP/M floppies in the office near my DEC Rainbow, I recall that was a little cheaper than VisiCalc.
What blew it out of the water was I distinctly remember shelling out almost $500 for WordStar on the DEC Robin and another $500 for Lotus on the Rainbow. Combined, that’s close to $3,000 in today’s dollars. Ah, the good ole days!
I knew a guy who ate his. Not all at once, but he gnawed away at it across several months until it was gone. I do not know why he did this. I seem to recall it was a fairly soft metal, hopefully not lead.
Roku bought the entire This Old House catalog, they now have a dedicated channel to the original shows from 1978 and forward.
I was watching season 4 from 1982, during the final walk through they demonstrated a new state of the art computer. The woman demonstrating told Bob it could do anything on it’s high resolution screen.
The word processor demonstration was painful to watch, I remember those days. You didn’t just highlight and click bold or underline. She showed a stack of 5 1/4 floppies with all the programs. And printing was a simple task, simple after you went through some menus (not even sure that menu is the right word) to find the print command.
The cost for this new technology in 1982? 42 hundred bucks or about 11 grand in today’s money.
My dad bought a family computer in 1983, the new Apple IIe. I still have that computer in the original box with all the packing material and manuals. One day when I’m really bored I’ll plug it in and play Transylvania or Colossal Cave Adventure (xyzzy) or fire up The Print Shop and print a banner that takes a half hour on a dot matrix printer.
My memories of software happened in the early 90s at commuter shows. There was a lot of shareware but the fun part was finding a guy who knew a guy with a cousin that had the phone number to a BBS with the real stuff. It was like buying drugs on the street. Fun times. And usenet, oops, first rule of usenet, never talk about usenet. Downloaded my first digital naked picture from usenet.
Wow, we are comrades in arms on that. The Ultima VI port was rumored to exist for so long that it was practically religion to me. Tantalizingly, the PC box even mentions the GS in the copyright text. This turned out to be boilerplate and I learned a few years ago that the port never made it off the drawing board. It was nowhere near as close to reality as had been believed at the time by hardcore fans.
Many said it was technically impossible as well, but later demos and games like GATE and Timelord proved how wrong that was. This only made the news even more disappointing, really.
I remember when the NES came out here in the US the cartridges were really expensive. Like I think when my parents went to buy me Metroid for getting on the honor role at school it was around 80 bucks or $200.23 in 2021 dollars. So, yeah early videogames were purely the hobby of the upper and middle classes. It was the 90s that saw the more common expansion of the consumer base both for consoles and PCs (shareware yay!).
So when I see people complain today about video games sometimes costing 70 bucks in present dollars I have to laugh a little bit cause it was WORSE in the past. Mind you, I don’t think those complaints are invalid, just that I’m glad folks are more price sensitive today. Especially since the whole DLCs (aka diet expansion packs) are far too common these days (I’m looking at you Paradox. Just cause I love Stellaris don’t mean that I think DLCs are valid.).
