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In the late 1970's, high school, I used a Wang 2200, PCS I believe it was. The BASIC was wonderful compared to anything else around (TRS-80 Level II, PET, Appl
by DannyB2 7y ago
In the late 1970's, high school, I used a Wang 2200, PCS I believe it was. The BASIC was wonderful compared to anything else around (TRS-80 Level II, PET, Apple).
Disks were an out of reach luxury at this time, but Wang's 9-track cassette tape drive was great. Nothing like using an audio cassette recorder on microcomputers of the era. More like using a mainframe tape drive. You could seek for files by name. Back up or skip forward by files at a time. The software controlled the tape drive forward and backward. The 9-track head was across the entire tape, so you could not "flip" the cassette tape over. This was a custom drive, NOT an audio cassette tape drive. And it ran the tape considerably faster than audio drives.
I discovered that it was possible to use inexpensive Radio Shack C-15 tapes (15 minute) because the tape was thick enough. This was vastly cheaper than buying the cassette tapes sold by Wang.
For the couple years I used this in high school, I had lots of fond memories. But soon grew out of it when I used bigger better machines and languages in college.