On Tue, Oct 02, 2007, Aviram Jenik wrote about "Re: Petition to ask MainConcept to release MainActor as Open Source software": > > Nadav Har'El wrote: > > > [1] On the first computer I ever used, the Commodore 64, a diskette held > > > around 160 KB (if I remember correctly). > > At least on the Apple ][, it was 144KB per side. Then again, the > > commodore may have had double sided disks. I'm afraid the only Commodore > > I had was an Amiga. > IIRC Commodore had 160k per side and was double-sided (but you had to make a > hole with a cutter on the other side and flip the diskette to access data on > the other side). But it was enough to have a full flight simulator that would > let you fly from Chicago to Seattle.
I wrote this "160 KB" number from memory, but looking now in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541 I see that a C64 diskette could hold 170 KB or 165 KB, depending on how you count. Oh, and yes, you *could* flip the diskette over, cut a new notch on the other side (there was even a special notch-cutter to do that!), and hold another 165 KB (or whatever) on the other side, but there wasn't a real point in doing this - unless you were really cheap (new diskettes weren't that expensive...) - because you had to manually flip the CD - the drive couldn't read from both sides. It was amazing what would fit on a diskette back than. The most fancy games used to fill up a whole diskette (wow!), but most games filled only a part of a diskette, so you could have diskettes with several games. Imagine what you can do with 160 KB of storage today - not much... -- Nadav Har'El | Tuesday, Oct 2 2007, 21 Tishri 5768 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Are you still here? The message is over. http://nadav.harel.org.il |Shoo! Go away! ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
