Talk about being transported back in time. I have been reading the series of articles on folklore.org about the development of the original Macintosh. It is written from an engineer’s perspective, so it is pretty interesting to me.

But as I am reading the articles I come to this one, entitled Disk Swapper’s Elbow which describes copying a disk in the low memory environments of the 128k Mac. Every once in awhile I think about the days before hard disks, jockeying floppies around like mad. But this article drew me right back to the days when I was using my C=64 (which had 64K of RAM and whose disks were 180k [at least with the 1541]).. I mean, I had completely forgotten how even basic tasks like copying a disk involved several swaps. And we got the 1541 disk drive for the Commodore as an aftermarket upgrade. Before that we were using cartridges (We didn’t use a cassette deck with the C=64, but we had with my Dad’s Superboard III kit).