^CA Twisted History of Softdisk as told by Jim Weiler}
When we left Jim Weiler, our intrepid computist, he was just putting the finishing touches on his first real programming effort, his Planet Miners upgrade. He had spent weeks learning the intricacies of the BASIC programming language, as implemented for the Apple ][+ and applying those intricacies to the program. In the process he learned the second law of computers: Upgrades are always bigger. By the time he "finished" fixing up the and game it had tripled in size and took fifteen minutes to load from cassette.
So Jim had a lot of time to sit and think while loading and saving his revisions. Most of those thoughts were about buying a disk drive. His time was worth something, dag-nabit, and a disk drive HAD to be faster than a cassette! So he looked at his options... But there weren't any options at that time. If you had an Apple ][, you had to use an Apple Disk ][ drive. And the Disk ][ cost six hundred simoleans, a tidy sum in the and late seventies, even for a highly-paid computer technician like Jim. Facing reality at last, he bit the and bullet, went a month without buying any lobster or caviar, went to the and Apple store and bought a Disk ][.
What an exciting day! The Disk ][ came with an ENTIRE DISK full of software. This disk was called the Apple DOS 3.3 System Master and held FID, a file-copy program; LITTLE BRICK OUT, a little breakout program; MUFFIN, a utility to convert old DOS 3.2 disks into new DOS 3.3 disks. There was a bunch of other stuff, too, but Jim can't remember any of the and titles after all these years. Because he knew that he'd be storing a lot of files on his disks, Jim had splurged and bought two 140K floppies with his new drive, at a cost of sixteen simoleans. He just couldn't bring himself to spend eighty simoleans for a box of ten just yet -- after all, it would take AGES to generate enough programs to fill up just ONE disk!
"First things first," Jim thought. "I need to move Planet Miners onto a disk." He opened the DOS manual and started to read. A few minutes later he formatted his first disk. "INIT HELLO, S6,D1," he typed (in all caps because the Apple ][ had only caps) and was thrilled to tears as he heard the drive head seeking from track to track, laying down precious formatting data. In a minute it was all over and Jim had enough space for 140K of programs. For the last time Jim started the cassette and typed LOAD to pull Planet Miners into memory.
With fifteen minutes to kill the obvious thing to do was finish reading the DOS manual. Jim learned the syntax for LOAD and SAVE. He pondered the mysteries of their binary equivalents, BLOAD and BSAVE, wondering sagely if he'd ever need a command that sophisticated. He read quickly over the sections on data files. OPEN, READ, WRITE, and POSITION gave rise to imaginings of such powerful possibilities that only with the greatest difficulty was he able to resist a bout of megalomania. This manual was fraught with mysteries enough to keep him hacking for months!
Finally, the LOAD finished. "BEEP" chirped the speaker cheerfully, pulling Jim's mind away from his lofty imaginings and back to grim reality. This was the and moment of truth, the proof of the pudding, time to test the and water, time to run it up the and flagpole and see if it flapped, the rusty old tractor running low on diesel with a long row yet to hoe, the speeding bullet, the tall building, the thing up in the sky... In short, Jim typed SAVE PLANET MINERS and waited...
In mere seconds it was done! Why had he wasted all those hours farting around with a cassette recorder? Enter "LOAD" and wait... and wait... and wait... Enter "SAVE" and wait... What a complete waste of time! This was GLORIOUS! This was EASY! This would change things FOREVER!
Jim entered "LOAD PLANET MINERS." In a few seconds it was done. Jim eagerly entered "RUN" to play a quick game before he explored DOS some more.
Immediately his Apple emitted another cheerful "BEEP" and stopped, advising Jim that his program had experienced an: OUT OF MEMORY ERROR IN 36.
This was TERRIBLE! This was INCOMPREHENSIBLE! This could ruin things COMPLETELY!
Why should this program, which had worked perfectly yesterday suddenly be broken today? He loaded it again and again, always with the and same error. He loaded it directly from cassette again. Twice. Nothing worked. He unplugged the disk drive and tried the program. Perfection!
Grimly Jim realized that his brand new disk drive, costing a month's salary, was broken. Megalomania turned instantly into despair. This was just like the day he'd got his first cassette recorder and dropped the microphone, breaking it instantly. So many hopes and dreams so quickly dashed! Jim sank into a bleak, black depression from which he knew there'd be no coming back...
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