Richard,

If you've got some old 8 inch diskettes, hang one up in your office. I've never heard such laughing as when I pinned one on my door with a label suggesting all employee salaries and bonuses were listed therein.

Most didn't even realize that 8 inch diskettes were ever real.

PAPER TAPE:
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In the early 80's we designed with the Signetics 8x300: the fastest bitbanger microcontroller. There was no support for the micro but we had one of the few emulators ever sold. It was loaded via paper tape that we created on a teletype hooked up to our Intel ISIS 8080 Dev-Sys. We used 8080 macros as our 8x300 assembler.

The delays and the Teletype breakdowns drove us nuts. I got stuck with the job to design a lab interface to bypass it all. I took the 20ma current loop from the devsys, converted it and tapped in to the emulator at its ribbon cable to the paper tape reader. It was a great improvement.

We gathered all the engineers into the lab, not to cheer the new interface as you may expect... but rather to ceremoneously push our old teletype down the back stairs! heeheheeheh. That is the last time I saw one.

-Jay C. Box