I was only 9 years old, but I believe that I received an MGT Sam with a disk drive for £200 somewhere around October 1990. Is that possible?
On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Andrew Collier<and...@intensity.org.uk> wrote: > On 3 Aug 2009, at 20:23, Adrian Brown wrote: > >> I remember selling my spectrum to part fund my sam and living without a >> computer for 5 months running up to the release of the sam before i >> could afford one :) Those were horrible days, but all worth it when i >> got the sam - even though it didnt have a disk drive, i could only aford >> the tape version. Defenders of the earth on tape- that was a painful >> load :) > > > I don't remember precisely when I got mine - probably towards the end of > 1990 since it was definitely after Sam Computers Ltd started up when you > could get the Sam with a disk drive included for under £200, which I did. > > "Eee, luxury", I can hear you cry - and maybe that's true, but I'll tell you > the disk drive was not the world-changing first impression which tape owners > might have you believe. You see, the instructions for the disk drive said > that the first things you must do is to backup the boot disk - and, being > the sort of nice boy who would read instructions and follow them, that's > exactly what I started by doing. In fact there was even an option on the > boot menu to do it; you would think this would run some semi-efficient disk > copying routine? I later discovered that all it did was to run COPY "*" TO > "*" and in the days before MasterDOS this involves swapping the floppy disks > back and forth for every individual file on the disk. > > So there I am, dutifully swapping between one floppy disk and another floppy > disk for what seemed like hours, wondering whether I was going to wear out > the floppy disks eject button on the first day, and this was before I had > even run Flash! or listened to the MGT anthem... > > Oddly enough, one of the first BASIC programs I wrote was a simple disk > copier which used READ AT and WRITE AT to read half a disk at a time into > memory and duplicate a disk in only two swaps. It wasn't fast, but it was > way easier than SamCo's approved method at the time... > > Andrew > > -- > http://www.intensity.org.uk/ > > > >
