Good Ol' Tandy Days

[Richard Kreiss]

Calculator - think smartphone and/or tablet.

I have run filepro on my IPhone.  Very small but it still worked.

I am waiting to see Windows 8 on a tablet.  This may be a better choice for
filePro on a table as it should work with a windows keyboard and have
function keys on the virtual keyboard.

Richard

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Linda Hapner [mailto:fplist at hapner.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 4:02 PM
> To: Richard Kreiss; bill at celestial.com
> Cc: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> Subject: Re: Good Ol' Tandy Days
> 
> I had the three drive expansion bay AND traveled to five clients each week
> (one day at each place) with it and the Model II.
> 
> How far we have come!  My calculator has more memory than the Mod II.
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Richard Kreiss" <rkreiss at verizon.net>
> To: <bill at celestial.com>
> Cc: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>; "Linda Hapner" <fplist at hapner.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 2:52 PM
> Subject: Re: Good Ol' Tandy Days
> 
> 
> 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
> > URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
> > Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
> > Fax:            (206) 232-9186  Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792
> >
> > 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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