Years ago I was told that faxes are required for security reasons because they can quickly and reliably leave an unedited paper trail. Signatures are also verifiable. This is also critical for the transmission of government, medical, banking, and legal information, as well as for home delivery services, etc.
There are so many different digital applications available for any of the many the above digital services that it is usually too confusing and time consuming to get important information securely distributed.
When double-sided floppies came out they naturally cost significantly more than single-sided. Of course they should. Yet single-sided disk drives were still the norm. Soon enough word got around that all floppy disks were made with both sides usable. Just mirror the write-enable/protection-notch with a second one. Disk notch punch sales were brisk I imagine. I still have mine.
I cut my write-enable notches with an X-Acto knife. Using another disk as a template. Most ended up looking as good as factory-made. Some were less pretty, but they all worked great.
I also discovered the hard way that some drives (especially in the PC world) used an optical sensor instead of a mechanical switch for the write-protect sensor. Transparent tape doesnāt work to write-protect media in those drives.
Fortunately, I almost always had (still have) plenty of official write-protect stickers, so I rarely needed to improvise.
Sigh, I didnāt get the memo about clock backup batteries, my Amiga 4000 was ruined. But it lives (in emulation) on my Mac Studio. Before the Apple Silicon build of FS-UAE, my Mac Studio was emulating an Intel emulation, of a PowerPC emulation of Motorola 68000 codeā¦ :-)
Something I havenāt thought about for many decadesā¦Apple going full speed ahead on developing and bringing the Apple Watch line very successfully to market.
Earlier on, Sinclair developed and built a branded watch bearing his name to market in the UK. For the US market, Sinclair developed a Timex Sinclair branded Watch. Both lines turned out to be extremely disastrous. Each group had a ton of visible variations, but they never did much, if anything, other than stick the Sinclair name on the Timex watches. And they charged a ridiculously high price for them:
Sinclair also did years of research about building an electric car, but he ran out of money before he could bring a car to test. He did come up with an electronic recumbent single passenger moped that turned to be super disaster:
Too bad Sinclair wasnāt even nearly as smart or visionary as Steve Jobs was.
Alison and I are doing a deep clean/reorg on my home office to set it up for post-retirement projects. All the stuff Iāve hauled around for 45 years is getting evaluated and culled.
Many discs with fonts or long forgotten typesetting jobs. Also a lot of Mac formatted blank media. Iād forgotten that companies like AT&T and Quill office supplies sold house brand Mac floppies.
I let go of all the Commodore 1541 drive 5-Ā¼ inch floppies when I sold the C-64 that got me through grad school. That was also quite a cache in 1988, because I bought most of my media in bulk. (100 for $24 as I recall.)
The first typesetting machines I worked with had the ancient 8-inch floppies; each generation of media drive got smaller and held more information.
It took typing this to realize that I havenāt purchased any media at all for the past 6 years; the last ones were optical DVD -R blanks.
That was interesting, his take that progress was not all that impressive. I guess he has a point, progress has been more about spread and impact rather than what computers actually do.
The comment about the C5 as something they knew was a āstepping stoneā in terms of EVs made me think about the AVP, which is feeling more and more like a very well funded research project.
I had one of those cassette tape drives for my Commodore VIC-20ā¦the very first computer I owned. Before I bought the tape drive, I would type in a BASIC program, play with the program for a while, and it would disappear when the computer was powered down.
The drive was heavily modified, and had two cables that connected to the computer; one seemed like it was actually a small printed circuit board with a key notch and edge connectors. A tape could store more than one program, and each program on the tape had a file name; as long as you were near the spot on the tape where the program started, it didnāt take all that long to load into memory from the tape.
Other contemporary computers (e.g. TRS-80, Apple) simply provided a port and a cable, expecting you to plug the computer into the microphone/headphone jacks of a standard cassette recorder. Which, for all practical purposes, was just as good and cost less.
