On 2009-04-30, Ivan Vegvary wrote:

"Jon Elson" wrote in message
...
Ivan Vegvary wrote:
How many of you have taken this road? Those that have know what I'm
talking about.

[ ... ]

I bought my Wang used from an engineering competitor. It had an IBM
selectric input/output, along with a flatbed plotter. Two Memorex floppy
drives were attached. One of the flopies (not the drive) went bad and had
to buy a new disc. $ 800 for an 8" floppy (yes, they were floppy in those
days) that had a capacity of about 160K.

Hmm ... soft sectored or hard sectored?

The 8" floppies which I used on my SWTP systems we

250 K (SSSD)
500 K (SSDD)
1 M (DSDD)

but some systems used the 8" floppies as punched card images, so a 128
byte sector would only usefully hold 80 bytes, so that would take a SSSD
from 250K down to 160 K.

I've seen the Wangs with the single cube and four stations --
and there was a single clamshell punched card reader as part of it.
Deadly slow to read a stack of cards -- but I guess that it didn't have
enough memory to make it worthwhile anyway. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

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