70
votes
Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
Forty years ago, a 7MB file would be unheard of, at least in contexts where floppies would be the only available means of transferring it. (Tapes were commonly used for large transfers on minis and ...
- 127k
57
votes
How were files transferred between different systems in the late 1980s?
The most classic serial solution here was ofc a direct serial connection and Kermit the most versatile software solution. Developed at the Columbia University, NYC, Kermit supported already in the ...
- 232k
31
votes
Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
40 years ago - 1978 - there was no home/hobbyist/small office computing to speak of. Maybe a few hundred people altogether. So you must be talking about commercial/industrial computing.
For large ...
- 6,354
30
votes
Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
As well as splitting across multiple floppy disks, there were several cabled communication options available ranging from your basic serial cables and sending data over via X/Y/ZMODEM or Kermit, but ...
- 12.4k
27
votes
Accepted
How does Laplink achieve "high speeds" on standard/legacy serial ports?
It's not dark magic, it's just that there is no hardware limit for 9600 bps to begin with.
There are many factors at play here, it's just not about the UART chip.
The speed depends on basically from ...
- 35.7k
24
votes
How were files transferred between different systems in the late 1980s?
I personally did not do any data transfer from home 8-bit systems to other systems, but I did do transfers from several older proprietary systems to Unix and MSDOS systems back in the 80’s.
We used a ...
- 3,274
22
votes
What was the ASCII end of medium (EM) character intended to be used for?
Wikipedia
“Intended as means of indicating on paper or magnetic tapes that the end of the usable portion of the tape had been reached.”, if en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes#EM is to be ...
- 21.9k
22
votes
How does Laplink achieve "high speeds" on standard/legacy serial ports?
A tight polling loop can easily achieve a solid transfer speed of 11,520 bytes/second over a 115,200 baud serial link, even when using a moderately slow processor. Even if a processor can only run ...
- 38k
21
votes
Can I image Amiga floppy disks on a modern computer?
Even though with a standard floppy drive there is no way to read it, there are several ways to do this:
If you have two floppy drives, you can use a program called Adfread (download) to override the ...
- 623
21
votes
Accepted
How is it possible to connect more than two floppy drives to a PC-compatible?
A PC floppy controller can control two drives. For the third and fourth drive you'd need a secondary controller. I haven't ever seen one for PCI, only for ISA - some ISA cards can be configured to ...
- 3,974
21
votes
How were files transferred between different systems in the late 1980s?
I worked on a project quite a few years ago (late 80's) where a client purchased truckloads of surplus military electronics inventory that he intended to sell into the spare parts market. The ...
- 310
21
votes
Accepted
What was the ASCII end of medium (EM) character intended to be used for?
TL;DR;
EM (or EOM as in early documents - and Unicode as well) was and is widely used in data transmission to mark
the physical end of a medium,
the end of the used portion of a medium, or
the end of ...
- 232k
20
votes
How is it possible to connect more than two floppy drives to a PC-compatible?
Following the Shugart standard, selections for 4 drives (DS0..DS3) are available on a single interface. The drives had to be jumpered accordingly. Hardware-wise the PC floppy controller also supports ...
- 232k
18
votes
How were files transferred between different systems in the late 1980s?
No, there were no adapters for different floppies.
Data was typically copied by serial port, if it was copied at all: Programs on some 8-bit computer (e.g. Apple II, Commodore 64) wouldn't run on an ...
- 29k
18
votes
Accepted
Why was the 1541 so slow?
the drive could end up only being able to transfer one bit per horizontal blank = 63 microseconds. 1/(63e-6) = 15873 bits/s = 1984 bytes/s.
That would be the bitrate during transmission within a byte,...
- 232k
16
votes
Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
Your timescales are out. Floppies might have just existed 40 years ago, but your average office worker never saw one. More to the point, office workers didn't pass machine-readable data around the ...
- 889
16
votes
Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
Do have a 7 MiB file, you would need a HD at least that size. In reality even a manyfold thereof, as usually one won't have a HD with just one file.
Now, in the real early times, lets say 70s, home ...
- 232k
14
votes
What are my modern options for loading programs and data files on the Apple IIc?
If you're happy to copy files and use Sneakernet then you could use a disk emulator like Floppy Emu, SDFloppy II, wDrive, etc. (Obviously all product links in this answer are likely to break in the ...
- 7,698
13
votes
How did Ceefax work?
It's a one-way Teletext system. Basically, the pages are sent in conjunction with the broadcast signal. The TV receiver knows how to extract the page information from the analog video signal.
As ...
- 1,582
13
votes
Accepted
How can SPI be used with a Z80 CPU to control an RFM95 LoRa module?
SPI is eventually the most simple interface to implement. It was designed especially to work with low end processors. I tend to use SPI for all my micro controller designs (*1).
Unless one intends to ...
- 232k
12
votes
Transfer files to DOS over serial cable from Linux?
This has already been well answered, but I wanted to respond with a couple of bootstrap solutions: that is, if all you have is a Linux box connected to a DOS box via a null-modem cable.
minicom on ...
- 21.9k
12
votes
How were files transferred between different systems in the late 1980s?
There were (and are) a few possibilities to transfer programs* and data between 8 bit Commodore systems and other platforms via floppy disks and other media.
Commodore 1541 floppy drives could be ...
12
votes
How were files transferred between different systems in the late 1980s?
I have done my share of transfers between incompatible systems.
There were some service bureaus that could convert floppy disks between different systems, and I used some to convert CP/M-86 ...
12
votes
How fast are transfers between the C64 and the 1541 floppy drive?
Without any modification Commodore 64 Serial Bus operates at 3200 bit/s (*1).
Effective maximum speed for C64+1541 is about 400 bytes/s.
Sustained speed with turn around and alike is about 300 bytes/...
- 232k
11
votes
Transfer files to DOS over serial cable from Linux?
You can also use dosbox or dosemu to run a simulated DOS environment, give it access to whatever ttyS* or ttyUSB* you have, and then use the DOS-to-DOS transfer methods.
Personally, I prefer Laplink, ...
- 29k
11
votes
Accepted
Transfer files to DOS over serial cable from Linux?
Some sort of comms program that supports Zmodem on the 286 end and use "sz" to send from the unix end. Zmodem has some advantages in that usually the receiving computer will auto start reception of a ...
- 5,327
11
votes
How is it possible to connect more than two floppy drives to a PC-compatible?
You'd definitely be looking for an ISA controller; it seems highly unlikely that anybody would make a PCI one as there would be little commercial application, and developing PCI cards is rare for ...
- 13k
11
votes
Accepted
What are some example uses of the Z80's BUSRQ/AK pins?
That would be any device that likes to take over the bus. Usually that would be some DMA controller handling an interface like a serial or parallel one. But it also can be anything you want - like ...
- 232k
11
votes
Partial sector transfers on old floppy disk controllers on old floppy-disk based operative systems (FDOS)
The Intel 8272 floppy controller may be a little late for you, but since you mention MS-DOS above you may still find this relevant. The 8272 has the ability to perform a partial transfer using the ...
- 8,258
10
votes
Accepted
Can I image Amiga floppy disks on a modern computer?
I have just completed an open source solution to this problem available at
http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk with full source code. The project is based around an Arduino and example code is for ...
- 116
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible