Good Ol' Tandy Days

[Richard Kreiss]

That was the later version. The original 8" IBM disks were 450kb. 

I had the 3 drive expansion bay giving me a whopping 1.8mb of capacity.

Richard
Sent from my iPhone

On May 9, 2012, at 3:43 PM, Bill Campbell <bill at celestial.com> wrote:

> On Wed, May 09, 2012, Richard Kreiss wrote:
> 
>> I gave an 8 inch floppy to a friend who taught computer science at Brooklyn
>> College. He showed it to one of his classes and told them that it held
>> 450kb of data. This was in the days of 1mb 3 1/2" disks. They were shocked.
> 
> I thought the 8in floppies on the Model II were 640k, and a
> whopping 1.2m on the double sided ones on the Model 16/6000s.
> 
> The max RAM one could get in the Model 16/6000s was 512K.  Bob
> Snapp made some jury-rigged RAM cards for this which piggy backed
> chips to get them to 1024k.  I first met Jim Asman when Bob told
> him to come to me in Seattle to buy the boards as Bob wouldn't
> ship them into Canada.
> 
> The original hard drive for the Model II was an 8in drive with 8
> meg storage and came with chirping bird sounds.  If one powered
> it up before removing the shipping strap on the bottom, it would
> toast the $4,500 drive.
> 
> The last mainframe I ran was a Burroughs B-4500 which had all of
> 200k *BYTES* of IC RAM, and ran an average of 20 programs in the
> mix at any time.  It would run circles around the comparably
> prices IBM 360s of the time.
> 
>> Now one can put 64gb in your pocket and it could get lost.
> 
>> We have gone from writers asking who needs or would ever use 35 mb hard
>> drive to buying a 1 plus tb drive for less then 100.00 for an internal
>> drive.
> 
> When I managed the Radio Shack X-department at 19th and K in D.C.,
> a woman came in asking for a machine with 128k RAM so I knew she
> came from the local Apple dealer.  I asked her what she wanted to
> use the computer for, and she said she wrote mystery novels.  I
> sat her down with a Model II running Scripsit, showing her how
> easy it was to deal with multi-page documents, how nice the
> keyboard was, etc. never mentioning the 64k RAM.  She bought the
> Model II, Scripsit, Daisy Wheel II that afternoon (about 6 grand), 
> and I took it to her Georgetown apartment later that day.  She
> had not bought the external HD enclosure even though I told her
> that she would undoubtably clobber her floppy without one.  A
> week later she came in saying I was right, bought the externl
> drive, and I managed to get her work off the non-bootable floppy.
> She then referred several other local authors to me who bought
> similar systems including a pair for Kitty Kelly and her husband.
> 
> As I've said before, Tandy was in a position to dominate the
> small computer business in the early '80s having good products,
> a distribution system second to none, and some very knowledgeable
> sales people.  Unfortunately they hadn't a clue how to deal with
> professional computer sales and marketing people.  It might be
> interesting to get people like me, John Esak, JP, and Tom Podnar,
> together to write a case study of how to kill a business.
> 
> Bill
> -- 
> INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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> Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that
> will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues
> a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.
>  -- Frederic Bastiat
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