I Remember Floppy Disks

@Maximusmax

I tried to teach myself BASIC with some success, but could never find how to make it write and read data files!

In the mid-1990s the machine-shop at work used a CNC Lathe whose work-piece programme was held on punched paper tape. Apparently this older system avoided potential problems with magnetic media becoming corrupted by the magnetic fields of the machine-tool's motors.

@ArishMell Windows 1 was on a hole punch tape. And was free to "hobbiests" as we were called then. A number of MS programs started that was.

I remember all those old formats as well. Even the 8 inch drives. That was back in the day of reel to reel taper decks. I remember when the 5 inch came of it was SSSS. Single sided single density. The hole punch help us double them capacity of them as did the invention of double density- so we had DSDD. i still have my hole punch.

Read/Data is more of less a loop. Us it as you would If/Then Or Goto/Gosub Or For/Next/

See this--the second section has the variables put into a string ($) Th e DATA is the days of the week.

http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~hile/basic/demo4-7.htm

@Elandra77
Thank you.

My first experience with MS was MS_DOS, then WIN 3.

In BASIC, I liked writing string-handling routines. One such would take a town name typed in lower case and capitalise it properly, e.g.:

wimborne st giles --> Wimborne St. Giles

That was one of my test-pieces for the routine. It read the ASCII value of each character and of that before it, and amend the entry accordingly by adding the numerical difference, but I can't remember how I made it enter the full-stop for "St.".

It was for an intended telephone-directory index that would list by town then number in alphabetical order, when the standard directories were vice-versa. This was to help in responding to private "For Sale" ads.

@Maximusmax I remember punch cards. We punched them with a device where we had to press 1 - 3 keys simultaneously for the required character code.

I also remember the 8 inch disks and "hard sectored" 5.25 inch disks.

Punched-cards go back a long way. Many large organisations' accounts departments used electro-mechanical calculators that read from punched cards. The principle was developed in the 19C for controlling player-pianos, fairground organs and the like.

And multiple keying of course is still important: the degree sign, º, uses ALT+0186. (It may differ on other computers or operating-systems.)I learnt that one at work, along with several others, for the symbols on graphs I had to produce in 'Excel'. That's when 'Excel' still actually had anything approaching fairly good graph-drawing and editing features!

@ArishMell Some computers (IBM?) used EBCDIC instead of ASCII too.

@Sharon
Oh, I've not come across EBCDIC. What was its principle?

I knew ASCII because I started to teach myself BASIC, and ASCII values of letters were fundamental to some string-handling routines I wrote as exercises.

@ArishMell Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code - it was just another way of expressing characters in binary. For example 'A' in ASCII is decimal 64 (41 hex), in EBCDID it's decimal 193 (C1 hex). You can see the codes here - http://www.simotime.com/asc2ebc1.htm

@Sharon
Thank you!

I was at school in the mid-1960s, when large organisations were beginning to find the money and physical space for these new computers, big tape-reels and all, and our Maths syllabus included a pilot thing called 'School Mathematics Project'.

SMP included Binary and Octal Arithmetic, and as usual with school maths course we were not told what if any uses these have; but I now realise this was in the days when doing even quite simple arithmetic on a computer required programming skills, and few could forecast most users would eventually not need that knowledge.