On 3 Aug 2009, at 20:23, Adrian Brown wrote:
I remember selling my spectrum to part fund my sam and living
without a
computer for 5 months running up to the release of the sam before i
could afford one :) Those were horrible days, but all worth it when i
got the sam - even though it didnt have a disk drive, i could only
aford
the tape version. Defenders of the earth on tape- that was a painful
load :)
I don't remember precisely when I got mine - probably towards the end
of 1990 since it was definitely after Sam Computers Ltd started up
when you could get the Sam with a disk drive included for under £200,
which I did.
"Eee, luxury", I can hear you cry - and maybe that's true, but I'll
tell you the disk drive was not the world-changing first impression
which tape owners might have you believe. You see, the instructions
for the disk drive said that the first things you must do is to backup
the boot disk - and, being the sort of nice boy who would read
instructions and follow them, that's exactly what I started by doing.
In fact there was even an option on the boot menu to do it; you would
think this would run some semi-efficient disk copying routine? I later
discovered that all it did was to run COPY "*" TO "*" and in the days
before MasterDOS this involves swapping the floppy disks back and
forth for every individual file on the disk.
So there I am, dutifully swapping between one floppy disk and another
floppy disk for what seemed like hours, wondering whether I was going
to wear out the floppy disks eject button on the first day, and this
was before I had even run Flash! or listened to the MGT anthem...
Oddly enough, one of the first BASIC programs I wrote was a simple
disk copier which used READ AT and WRITE AT to read half a disk at a
time into memory and duplicate a disk in only two swaps. It wasn't
fast, but it was way easier than SamCo's approved method at the time...
Andrew
--
http://www.intensity.org.uk/
