Unlike computing today, the big issue for computing in the 1980s was disk compatibility. Yep, as I’ve been crowing all along, it’s the software that drives the hardware industry. That was true in the early 1980s, and it was also insane.
You probably don’t think anything about sticking a CD into your computer today to see what’s on it. Whether you have a PC or Mac, the disc is read, music is played, a video is watched, the disc is blank and needs formatting, or it’s just plain unusable. No big deal.
Back in 1982, however, disks were fussy — and the disk drives were expensive. I paid $800 for my first 180K disk drive and the floppy disks cost about $5 each — in bulk.
Sticking any old disk into your computer’s disk drive met mostly with failure. That’s because the computers of the day didn’t understand each other’s disk formats. Even if you had two computers running the CP/M operating system, odds were really good that they couldn’t read each other’s disk formats.
A software store had stacks of software for each computer platform. Going into the local Software-O-Rama you saw the following categories: IBM PC, CP/M, Apple II, Commodore 64, and others. (TRS-80 software was sold only through Radio Shack.)
Fortunately, there were versions of popular programs for each of the different hardware makes and models. Still, even though you could buy the same program for different computers, it didn’t mean you should share data. A WordStar file from an Apple II computer might not be readable on an IBM PC, even if you could get the file from one computer to another.
It wasn’t until MS-DOS took over the market by the late 1980s that disk compatibility ceased to be an issue.
So we had a lot of floppy disks back then. In fact, I remember having several hundred 5 1/4-inch floppy disks. Yes, I labeled them.
Originally, the floppy disks were single-sided; information could be recorded only on one side of the disk. Then double-sided drives appeared, which also doubled the disk’s capacity from 180K to 360K.
In 1984, the Macintosh introduced the 3 1/2-inch diskette, which had a hard case so it wasn’t really a floppy disk anymore. It stored 400K on a single side, but was utterly incompatible with any other computer.
In 1987, IBM introduced the 3 1/2-inch diskette for the PC/MS-DOS computers. It held 720K in a double-sided format. Eventually a double-density version of the diskette was available that stored 1.2MB of information. The Mac, too, got a double-sided 800K floppy diskette.
Double-density and double-sided were popular disk terms in the 1980s.
Hard drives came about slowly in the 1980s. The second generation PC, the IBM PC/XT came with a 10MB hard drive. That was in 1983 or so. I remember buying a 20MB hard drive for about $400 in 1985. It was my first PC hard drive, but DOS back then could only “see” 10MB at a time, so I had to partition the drive into C: and D:.
Hard drives remained rare during most of the 1980s. Many people primarily used floppy disks even into the early 1990s; the hard drive was optional on a PC.
I remember paying $1000 for a 90MB hard drive in 1989.
Yeah, that was a lot of money for only 90MB, but consider that files back then weren’t really that large: New software still came on 360K floppy disks, which was the least common denominator. So program files were, at most 360K in size. Data files were smaller.
Disk capacity didn’t become a big issue until the 1990s, when computers routinely stored large graphics files. Then later came music and video files in the late 1990s, which required even more storage. But for storage in the 1980s, that was pretty much it.
Dan- This is a lot of great information. Ive heard it took multiple floppys to run a program, but if the computer had no hard drive, how did the computer save information from one floppy to the next? I heard the C64 did not even have an OS but just ran a Basic interpreter. Also what programming languages and compilers were common in the early 80s? Were Basic, Pascal and C the big three? Was assembly programming popular considering there were so many different processors with there own machine code? Is it true the PC started out a weakling, and that it was the processor speed of the intel chip the finally pulled it ahead of the pack? I heard Radio shack made a portable version of their Trash80 that became one of the first popular laptops.
Comment by BradC — July 29, 2009 @ 12:42 am
Yes. If you wanted to spell-check in WordPerfect, you had to remove the WordPerfect program disk and insert the WordPerfect Proof disk. There were lots of programs that had such disk-shuffling features. Computers were notoriously slow then.
You could run a PC with only one floppy drive because the memory was larger than the floppy drive. Back then, as now, programs had minimum RAM requirements. For most programs it was 256K, though having more RAM meant less disk-swapping. I had a 640K machine, which meant both the program and data could sit in memory.
I further augmented main memory with expanded memory of 512K. I converted that memory into a RAM drive, where I would copy the program disks and keep them in memory all the time. Not only did I not have to disk-swap in that setup, but the programs ran faster from the RAM drive.
Also, the command interpreter (DOS) could be unloaded from memory. That led to a third disk-swapping situation, where the PC would say “Bad or missing command interpreter,” which meant you had to insert the DOS disk again. Or, because DOS was mono-tasking, you simply punched the reset button and rebooted the thing with a new DOS disk.
Yes, as did the Apple II, TRS-80, and even the diskless IBM PC. They ran off of BASIC in ROM and that was the “operating system.” Then, when you got a disk drive for your microcomputer, you got a disk operating system. Apple had ProDOS, TRS-80 had TRS-DOS, and IBM PC had PC-DOS.
I would say Basic and Assembler were the big two. Pascal was used by a few people, mostly university students. You used BASIC because it came with the system. Assembler was fast and tiny, which was important then. I wrote a game in assembly language that was only 400 bytes long. The BASIC equivalent was 65K. And Assembly ran very, very fast, so it was preferred by any serious developer.
There were some C compilers, but C required a lot of resources that weren’t available on the early microcomputers. I didn’t first hear about C until about 1985 or so and I don’t remember seeing a C compiler for the PC until Borland’s TurboC in 1987.
Prolog was popular for a while as an AI language. In fact, AI was something people were really excited about in the late 1980s.
Well, you picked a CPU and learned Assembly for that and then you could learn Assembly for any other CPU a lot easier. I learned Z80, which meant I could write Assembler for the TRS-80 and CP/M machines. Picking up 8088/8086 Assembly for the PC was easy after that as the two CPUs are related. I also programmed Assembler for the 6502 on the Apple, which was easier because it had fewer registers.
After a while, however, it became obvious that Assembly programs took too long to develop. As programs grew more complex, the developers moved to C. That migration took place in the late 1980s.
Not really. The PC had a slower processor than the TRS-80, but it was the mountain of software that appeared for the PC that pushed it over the top. IBM fully documented the PC’s guts, providing schematics for the internals and publishing the code for the BIOS. (I still have a copy.) They made the PC system open; open architecture they called it. That accelerated software development to a frenetic pace and by about 1984 or so, it was obvious that the PC was going to have more published programs for it than any other hardware platform. It’s still true today.
Yes, the TRS-80 Model 100 was the first of the modern laptops. Actually, we’d probably call it a “Tablet” today, albeit a tablet with a functional keyboard and an 8-line by 40-column display. It was a handy portable computing device, very popular, and pretty much the foundation for modern laptops and PDAs. I worked with one early on. The publishing company I worked for did a book on one, so I got to play with it. I even have one today, which I bought for a photograph that appears in Laptops For Dummies.
Great questions! Thanks!
Comment by admin — July 29, 2009 @ 8:47 am