On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Douglas Quebbeman wrote:
> Among other platforms... (wasn't the Terak a UCSD machine?).
>
> I think you had to have the Integer Basic (?) card for it to work.
No, but you did have to have 64K, the upper 16K also being referred to as
the "Language Card", which is what got you confused probably.
Historical note: the "Language Card" was originally a card that had either
Integer BASIC or AppleSoft BASIC ROMs on it (mapping into the upper 16K of
64K) that you could switch in when you wanted your Apple to take on an
alternate personality. It later was just a RAM card that you could load
whatever you wanted into it, including your own code. Lots of games used
the extra RAM.
> I copied the system onto single-sided verbatim floppies that I'd
> punched to use as "flippies"... the school wasn't hip to copying
> software, at least not in '83.
If I recall properly, the whole system took 4 disk sides. If you were
lucky enough to have 4 drives you were stoked. If you had one drive you
were a sorry asshole. Two drives made the system nominally useful, but it
was still slow, buggy, and left you with the feeling of having eaten an
excessively hairy man's worn underwear, especially after it erased the
code you'd been working on for several days for no apparently good reason
(I don't consider the wrong disk being in the drive a good reason...poor
error checking is never an acceptable excuse).
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Wed Nov 29 2000 - 14:02:01 GMT