Quote:
Originally Posted by imcarthur
My 1st job in 'real' Consumer Electronics in 1981 involved selling 5 1/4 & 8 1/2 Maxell floppy discs. I didn't even personally own a computer that would except them until 1986.Ian
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We used to buy Maxell floppies by the tens of thousands back during the 70's through late 90's. We used them to send out system releases and updates for our insurance agency rating and accounting software.... fond memories spending hour after hour manually duplicating 5 1/4 and 8" floppies on dual drive systems until we could finally afford to buy disk duplicators.
We started out software business in 1978 using TRS-80 Mod I's with 48K of memory (writing software for insurance agents in BASIC). Initially backing up to tape (very slow and unreliable) then moving to 360K 5 1/4" single-sided floppies when they came out. The 5 1/4's eventually went double-sided read/write (720K). Our turnkey system ( a TRS-80 MOD I, 48K with dual 5 1/4" floppy drives and a dot matrix printer) with our basic rating software package ran almost $7500 and we sold a lot of them.
When the MOD II TRS-80s came out in late 1978 IIRC, you could get up to 512K memory and they used 8" floppies. RS evenually released a HD drive for the MOD II with 8 MBytes of storage and just the drive retailed for $4500.... They ran using the TRSDOS operating system... a Model II with 8 meg HD and our full rating software package went for around $10K...
We eventually moved to Model 16's running multi-user XENIX with dumb terminals and much of our software written in COBOL....
Radio Shack was light years ahead of everyone else at that time but quality control problems, proprietary hardware and just the name Radio Shack doomed them when the IBM PCs came out... although the early versions of MSDOS weren't much better than TRSDOS
This was all before the advent of the IBM PCs. Apple was around but were totally useless for serious business software development as Apple never released any developmental software for serious business use and being totally proprietary allowed no one else to do so....
The open architecture of the IBM PC and, most importantly, just the name IBM doomed Radio Shack even though it was years before we could actually sell a multi-user system on PCs and that was using Novell or Alloy multiuser software, not Microsoft... and was very expensive as each workstation was a PC, not a dumb terminal..
Anyway, On all these systems, we used Maxell floppies (5 1/4", 3.5" and 8") for releases and updates.... by the tens of thousands over the years...
and forgive the trip down memory lane...
footnote which may interest no one: the most pirated software in the late 1970's was the first word processor which came out in 1976: "Electric Pencil" by Michael Shrayer.