On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, Josh Paetzel wrote: > in the 70's I didn't know that many people with computers, but they > almost all had floppy drives, and the ones that didn't weren't happy > about saving to cassette tape. I would think that floppies were much faster. I was born in 1958. I went to Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in 1976. No student had a computer. We had hand-held calculators. The computers supplied by the university would astonish you today -- no monitor, just a printer terminal where you'd type a line and then see it printed out. There were very few terminals and comp sci students stayed up all night to have a chance to use them. Very primitive, and that was a good school, ranked #1 in undergrad engineering education at that time, or so they claimed. I don't remember knowing anyone who owned a computer until the early 1980s and I do remember a computer from that era with a cassette tape for storage. I didn't see any floppies until somewhere around 1985. I know the floppies existed but they just weren't being used by everyday people. The only 8" floppies I have ever seen were being used by secretaries at UW-Madison in their specialized word processing machines (not general purpose computers) when I got there in 1986, but those floppies were quickly replaced by newer technology (I think they moved them to PCs running Word Perfect). I definitely wasn't hanging out with cutting-edge computer folk. I was just an ordinary guy. All the fancy computer stuff that was out there in the world was not in my local environment. Maybe if I had lived in a wealthy neighborhood I would have known people with floppy drives in the 1970s (I wish I did!). In my high school in Massachusetts (I graduated in 1976) we had one computer and it used a paper tape with little holes that I believe were read mechanically. I learned to program it in BASIC. A classroom of kids had to take turns typing in their programs and few of us knew how to type. I'm glad those days are gone! Mike