On Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:28:51 -0600, Allen wrote:

Neil wrote:
snip

Careful, I had a mouthful of coffee, that's another keyboard wrecked.

Never had any 8" floppies, I've got an unopened box of 5.25" in the
cupboard.

Regards,

I hope you aren't feeling sad about missing out on 8" floppies. I had
some dealings with them on mainframes (IBM 135, 145), minicomputers,
some early microcomputers, and keypunch replacement devices; they were
convenient for transferring data from mainframes to minis, among other
things. Fine in their time--which corresponded roughly with the hyday of
Kodak Tri-X.
Allen

And I hope you're not belittling my 8" floppies, they still work just fine for
transferring data to my 10 meg MFM hard-drives on my CP/M machines. With that
much storage I don't think I'll ever fill them up. But I do wish they'd get
these 150 baud modems smaller. The one I have now is the size of a medium
suitcase, weighs about 35 lbs., and needs to be hard-wired into the
communication lines. At least it still works good. The speed is impressive. I
can send all the data from an 8" - 168k single-sided floppy in about 2 days ...
if nothing goes wrong. I should invent some kind of error checking protocol, it
would help. So far the receiving computer owner and I just check our wall-clocks
and agree when I'll try to start sending data. If it fails then we try again on
15 minute intervals to get them talking to each other. It works about 50% of the
time.