Subj : Re: BBS's with MS-DOS software?
To   : Spectre
From : Bob Worm
Date : Fri Oct 20 2023 07:07:31

  Re: Re: BBS's with MS-DOS software?
  By: Spectre to Bob Worm on Fri Oct 20 2023 06:49:00

Hi, Spec.

 > My drive didn't last that long.  It lost the end of tape sensor... being an
 > optical sensor and a small hole in the tape.  I cleaned it up a couple of
 > times, and rewound a few tapes, but in the end it just became unviable.  No
 > idea what I did with the tapes themselves now.

I imagine it must make a hell of a bang when it hits the end of a tape :\

 > At different times, my tapes did different duties. Backups of course, and
 > after some time I found a door that would let you use a tape as a file
 > area.. of course it had latency in retrieving the file for download, but
 > being able to have a slab of monolithic data was handy, and could free up
 > drive space.

That sounds useful but I have so many questions... Did it tell the user their download would start in X minutes? How many times did some random guy downloading "Roger's disk utility" wake you up in the middle of the night? Does that amount of tape reuse throw muck all over the end of tape sensor? ;)

 > I only ever had SCSI in the Apple II world, and there were plenty of
 > cheapish drives kicking around, like the ol' Archive Viper but I could never
 > get them to talk to any of the available software.

Ah, yes. This is one of the things I'd forgotten about retro computing until I returned to it. That and the complete lack of "common" connectors across systems. Or they have common connectors like a serial port but they want 7e2 and expect you to do something jazzy like trigger the ring indicator pin before they will talk to you... I hated the idea of USB when it came along but we really are spoiled these days!

BobW
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