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I purchased TM-2 from Echelon in 1986. I was a minor, so I went to Echelon's office in Los Altos and paid cash for an 8" floppy. TM-2 was awesome, but extremel
by whyenot 4y ago
I purchased TM-2 from Echelon in 1986. I was a minor, so I went to Echelon's office in Los Altos and paid cash for an 8" floppy.
TM-2 was awesome, but extremely buggy. I used it on an Altos ACS8000, a 4-user machine that originally ran MP/M and would have been $10-20k new. My dad and me got it used at a computer swap meet for maybe $500. My dad helped me to get CP/M running on the machine, and it was great because it could use some of the extra memory in the ACS8000 as a small ram disk. A few years later, I used TM-2 for all my assignments in AP Computer Science, and it sucked having to work around all the bugs.
I'm kind of wistful thinking about it now, because that was right around the time I began to realize that in classes I was almost always the only female in the room. It led to a lot of unwanted attention and awkward situations. Eventually it led to me changing careers.
- kragen 4y agoThis gets me in the feels. What career did you change to?
- billpg 4y ago8 inch floppies in 1986? My recollection was that the 5¼ inch floppy was ubiquitous with 3½ inch floppies as the up and coming next-generation technology.
- boffinAudio 4y ago8-inch floppies were actually quite common in the mid-80's on machines such as the OP described. I've still got a few stashed in some archives somewhere, with old code I wrote. I shudder to think the effort required to use those floppies again somehow, though .. not exactly the same dilemma I face with the drawer full of Iomega JAZ and ZIP drives, though .. :P
- zozbot234 4y agoYou might want to copy that stuff ASAP if you haven't done so already, because it's not going to get any easier to read in the future. Both due to age of the media itself and the weird formats involved, for which reading equipment is starting to get quite rare and hard to find.
- ralphc 4y agoI'm a "collector" in that I bought the stuff originally and never got rid of it. I recently purchased a FC5025 from device side data. With Apple ][ disks from early 80's, I had about a %50 rate of reading them successfully. It's even worse on my TRS-80 cassettes.
- zasdffaa 4y agoSorry to hear about the unwanted attention and awkwardness, and having it push you onto a different path.
- moomin 4y agoWe (the tech industry) have lost so many great people by being an uncomfortable/unsafe place for a lot of people. In 2022 we’ve come a long way, but it doesn’t take long just flicking through HN to see how much further we have to go.
- hulitu 4y agoThis is because of society. When the boys' clothes are blue and the girls' are pink the society has a problem.