Future Collectables

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Sun Nov 8 19:16:14 1998

< His name was Robert Suding. I have not talked to him for a long time.
< left Colorado over 20 years ago. Robert lives out in western Colorado n
< I do not know if he is doing any design work of any kind.

This was late in the game.

The Altair when first available had 4 cards for IO, the SIO-A (single
serial), 2SIO (2 6850 serial ports), PIO(parallel) and the infamous ACR.

At the time of the demo the ACR was available with usable software. Why
they chose TTY loading to this date is speculation.

What Sudding did do was to make the 300baud (30CPS) ACR and the 300baud
(also 30cps) Kansas City standard look slow by pushing to 1500baud
so that loading at 150cps was doable. However the Sudding standard
never caught on as it was not tolerent of some problems (tape speed).
The Tarbell standard would give a higher data rate and was self clocking.

So went the audio casette hardware wars. When it was reaching it's peak
most of us were looking at either real tape (saturation with block
replaceability), disks or disk like systems.


Allison
Received on Sun Nov 08 1998 - 19:16:14 GMT