The last thing I want to do is get involved in the Sellam/Dick spat,
and I'm certainly not pimping for Apple, but...
On Sat, 10 Nov 2001 at 22:42:13 -0700 Richard Erlacher wrote:
> I didn't use an Apple with or without an 8" disk subsystem, but no one I
know
> who did useful work on an Apple][ back in '79-'85, after which the
Apple][ was
> pretty irrelevant, relied on the 5-1.4"diskettes.
During that time period I wrote software for Apples that were used as
satellite video encryption controllers. We had a custom interface card
in one of the Apple slots that drove the encryptor, but we certainly relied
on the standard 5 1/4" disk drives. The machines would typically be installed
in remote uplink sheds, everywhere from San Diego to northern Canada,
and to my knowledge we had no failures due to the disk drive. None of
the drives ever received any maintenance, preventative or otherwise.
And yes, I enjoyed 6502 programming very much. To tie yet another thread
into this, I wrote code to work with the Hayes Micromodem II that allowed
the network operator to transfer new authorization information to the Apple.
(We later upgraded to the Hayes Smartmodem 1200.) These setups also
used a Thunderclock card for real-time clock information.
I still have a Micromodem II but I can't seem to find a Thunderclock card.
Around that same time I bought a video digitizer from Microworkz -- it was
a card that plugged into the Apple and accepted baseband video input.
I remember writing machine code to sample the video and print out the
greyscale image on an HP Thinkjet printer. Cool stuff for the early 80's.
Cheers,
Dan
http://www.decodesystems.com/wanted.html
Received on Sun Nov 11 2001 - 22:57:36 GMT