Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!killer!elg
From: elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm
Subject: Re: Zmodem on commodores?
Message-ID: <7125@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Date: 12 Feb 89 21:22:33 GMT
References: <1573.23F37816@isishq.FIDONET.ORG>
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 34

in article <1573.23F37816@isishq.FIDONET.ORG>, izot@f171.n221.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Geoffrey Welsh) says:
$  > > Second, one could not download files larger than {128K, 256K, 512K}.
$  >
$  > Is that really a limitation? I rarely see files bigger than 300 blocks
$  > (half a 1541), because most people use ARC or LYNX with a single
$  > 1541 drive and couldn't de-archive anything bigger than 80K.
$  
$    Speak for yourself! When I was still using my CBM 8-bit stuff, I never had 
$ a computer that wasn't connected to at least one 1-meg drive (SFD, 8250). 1581 
$ offers nearly that, and 8050 (like Joe Greco uses) offers a comfortable 1/2 
$ meg. Any CBM hacker interested in top-notch performance threw his 1541 into a 
$ corner (if not out the window) long ago.

While the serious speed freeks through out their 1541s, the majority
of C-64 users still use them, for the same reason they have C-64s in
the first place -- cost. I rarely see software for download on a BBS
that's longer than around 300 blocks, for the simple reason that most
of the USERS of that BBS could not use it (and thus the sysop won't
keep around anything bigger, because most of his users can't download
it). 

BTW, the 1541 does have one serious advantage over more "modern"
hardware. I've never seen a copy program for, say, a 1581 or SFD-1001
that'd copy at anywhere near the data rate of the fastest 1541 copiers
(around 40 seconds for 160K? Thats, hmm, 4Kbytes/second). The old 8050
I have hooked to the BBS might manage that, but I've never used its
builtin diskcopy command, so I really don't know (when I do backups, I
use the internal filecopy command, to un-fragment the disk -- and that
takes FOREVER).

--
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