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Originally Posted by Sualdam
I can remember when disk drives started to become affordable and the usual crowd of Luddites would write to the magazines DEMANDING that the published software (or cover-cassettes) remain cassette-based.
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The first desktop I ever used was an HP model designed for a lab - the only storage device was a cassette tape - 64 kb (note the "k", not Mb) RAM - we (a government department) purchased that with a printer (heat sensitive paper) for just under $50,000, although that did include a reasonably sophisticated A-D converter as a lab interface.
Believe it or not, we wrote programs in interpreter BASIC that ran some quite complex statistical analyses - it meant swapping bits in and out of RAM to the cassette tape as needed, so we'd have to boot it up in the morning and let it run all day (or sometimes overnight if it wasn't finished).