On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Greg McCarroll wrote: > However I remember the PD catalogues well. I'm trying to remember how > much they cost per floppy, to see if it they were better value than > downloading by a low baud modem. The problem is I had a different > perspective on money back then, so I seem to remember they were > costly, when they might of only been a quid a piece. I learned C using > a C compiler from a PD company, personal C compiler i think it was > called.
It was normally somewhere between 1 and 3 quid a disk. My library (which looked more like a hybrid of ST Format cover disks and umich) was a pound per disk, and you can fill it up as you please, most places had set disks, and mostly filled them up, and a few places would only put a few things on one disk, and charge the earth still. I make that about 40 minutes download for 720K of data, assuming the other end could keep your modem busy, but I've not got any info on ancient phone tarriffs, but I'm guessing it was about comparable. But with modems costing so much, and dialup accounts on top of that, it wasn't cheap to get started. Which reminds me, really must ebay my collection of st/amiga and st format mags (and edge, if any of you modern gamer folk are interested in a purchasing such things) the hatter
