On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, Josh Paetzel wrote:

> in the 70's I didn't know that many people with computers, but they 
> almost all had floppy drives, and the ones that didn't weren't happy 
> about saving to cassette tape.

I would think that floppies were much faster.

I was born in 1958.  I went to Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in 
1976.  No student had a computer.  We had hand-held calculators.  The 
computers supplied by the university would astonish you today -- no 
monitor, just a printer terminal where you'd type a line and then see it 
printed out.  There were very few terminals and comp sci students stayed 
up all night to have a chance to use them.  Very primitive, and that was a 
good school, ranked #1 in undergrad engineering education at that time, or 
so they claimed.

I don't remember knowing anyone who owned a computer until the early 1980s 
and I do remember a computer from that era with a cassette tape for 
storage.  I didn't see any floppies until somewhere around 1985.

I know the floppies existed but they just weren't being used by everyday 
people.  The only 8" floppies I have ever seen were being used by 
secretaries at UW-Madison in their specialized word processing machines 
(not general purpose computers) when I got there in 1986, but those 
floppies were quickly replaced by newer technology (I think they moved 
them to PCs running Word Perfect).

I definitely wasn't hanging out with cutting-edge computer folk.  I was 
just an ordinary guy.  All the fancy computer stuff that was out there in 
the world was not in my local environment.  Maybe if I had lived in a 
wealthy neighborhood I would have known people with floppy drives in the 
1970s (I wish I did!).  In my high school in Massachusetts (I graduated in 
1976) we had one computer and it used a paper tape with little holes that 
I believe were read mechanically.  I learned to program it in BASIC.  A 
classroom of kids had to take turns typing in their programs and few of us 
knew how to type.  I'm glad those days are gone!

Mike