

The story of FCopy for the C-64 - ssp
http://www.pagetable.com/?p=647

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saundby
25 minutes to do a copy? I remember it taking about 45 minutes per disk to do
a backup copy.

I also remember having to break out the oscilloscope every time I played F-15
Strike Eagle and Psi-5 Trading Company to re-align the disk head. Until a
friend gave me cracked copies, which allowed me to simply play the games. (By
that time I had purchased two copies of Psi-5, after the first disk refused to
recognise itself as a valid copy!)

Worst copy protection I ever encountered, until Lotus 123 came along.

~~~
CamperBob
There are lots of good points to make about the cost/performance attributes of
the Commodore 64 and how awesome it was to work and learn on... but it's also
true that the 1541 disk drive is up there with the original IBM display
adapters in the annals of incompetent engineering.

As a teenager with an Apple II+, I first understood what a genius Steve
Wozniak was when I realized that the disk drive on my friend's C64 ran at
about the same speed as the Apple's _cassette port_. The fact that the 1541
was so slow _even though it had its own dedicated CPU_ was just icing on the
cake. How'd that happen? Did the engineer at Commodore actually go home and
sleep well that night, thinking he'd done a good job?

~~~
dedward
There were many mistakes made at C=, but engineering wasn't one of them.

I'm fairly certain the serial speed was kept low because of a management
decision to keep the drive compatible with some earlier C= business gear. The
engineers had designed the thing to be much better than it was out of the box.

The drive, and the C64, were both capable of running the serial port at a much
higher speed, (and that's what your fast-load cartridge did....)

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jerf
Heh, next time I hear someone talk about how wonderfully optimized all code
was back "in the days" and how wasteful we all are now, maybe I'll send them
this article, referring to the shipping software on the 1541.

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psykotic
> Back in the 80s, the Commodore C-64 had an intelligent floppy drive, the
> 1541, i.e. an external unit that had its own CPU and everything.

I remember by the time I got a floppy drive for my C64 it was twice the price
of a new C64, $400 vs $200. It was a real luxury item in those days.

Obligatory link to Michael Steil's The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRRCnque2E>

~~~
protomyth
Yeah, the price of floppy drives was insane (bought an Indus for my Atari
400), but it sure made you feel great after using a damn tape drive (I curse
you Atari 410).

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polo
I remember FCopy and its successors (esp. FCopy++) with fondness from my
childhood. In those days many heated discussions arose around which copy
program was fastest, most accurate, or, ah, most "useful" when it came to
"backing up" games :-)

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blue1
now, if only someone could finally reveal to me what "hullabaloo mode" did in
Fast Lightning, a disk copy program for the Amiga...

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protomyth
I really think we have lost something since those days since a computer you
can program cannot be gotten in the under $200 category.

// I suppose somewhere there is an example, but nothing I've seen in a big box
store

~~~
gjm11
$200 in (say) 1985 ~= $400 in 2011. You can get a computer you can program for
$400, and it will be a lot more capable than a Commodore 64.

~~~
protomyth
That nice an all, but I'm pretty sure a lot of kids could afford the $200 and
not the $400. Technology is supposed to be cheaper and not a doubling.

~~~
gjm11
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough? Inflation means that $200 in 1985 is, for most
practical purposes, the equivalent of $400 now. Prices now are about double
what they were then. Salaries now are about double what they were then. The
number of children who could afford $200 then is probably comparable to the
number who can afford $400 now.

~~~
protomyth
I get what your saying, but $400 is still a lot of money today for a lot of
people including those not in the US. Other consumer electronic devices have
dropped in price, but the entry point for a new computer has stratified into
price tiers with the sub $200 being ignored.

Even the C64 or Atari 400 were not in the price range of many people.
Spreading the entry point for children / teens to become programmers has taken
a hit.

Given the down votes, it makes me wonder if people were really concerned with
OLPC's goals or just wanted a cute laptop for themselves. We seriously need to
fill the low niches so smart, poor children have an opportunity to get into
programming and explore like some of us more privileged people did.

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ghshephard
A major takeaway from this story is that among the many innovations we can
thank Apple for, one of the largest is finally creating a platform, mechanism,
and support framework that allows individual developers the ability to be
recompensed for their intellectual creations.

It's also nice to see competition creating variants of it on other platforms
as well - so you can get the advantages of both a open platform (Android) and
versions of Apple's App Store from Google and Amazon.

~~~
cek
Did you comment on the wrong story? I do not understand how you connected a
story about the Commodore 64 floppy drive in the 1980s with Apple & Google
today.

~~~
chipsy
I'm sensing some kind of rule of technology stories: All stories must be
perceived as commentary on contemporary Apple and Google.

