did you use tape or disk drives?

[tyranthraxus]

There's an interesting thread at lemon64 about the regional popularity

of tape & disk drives in the commodore scene. Since I never owned

an 8-bit Atari until this century what was the more popular format?

[AtariDude]

I remember that originally with my Atari 800XL, my friend and I used to use the tape drive to save programs that we had typed in basic. It however was annoying because it became important to record the exact location of the tape where a program was stored. If we did not write it down, it became impossible to retrieve a program.

 

Eventually I bought a disk drive and used it to transfer all our programs to diskette. Plus it was fun to finally be able to play Zork which is the first program my friend bought when we got the disk drive (I bought F15 Strike Eagle as my first commercial diskette game).

[walter_J64bit]

There's an interesting thread at lemon64 about the regional popularity

of tape & disk drives in the commodore scene. Since I never owned

an 8-bit Atari until this century what was the more popular format?

 

I've started with the tape drive but I had more carts no load time there! then I got the 1050.

[TMR]

My poor 800XL was tape based, that's probably why i didn't get any programming done with it... no way to do high-speed freeze saves like i did with the C64 and an Expert cartridge a year later.

[+davidcalgary29]

I'm sure that there was a regional bias to the relative popularity to A8 media devices. I know that, in Southern Ontario, tape-based software had become extremely scare by '83, and Atari Canada began to push the 1050 heavily in '84-'85. My own 1050 cost $250 CDN in '85, and I'm sure many people upgraded at this time.

 

I have never found a 1010 drive in "the wild" in Canada, and come across old, battered 410s only very rarely. I do, however, run across 1050s about once a month (working or not) in thrift stores, private sales, etc.

[somePUNK]

i'm in canada and i own almost all drives i got them all at one garge sale man.

[LYNXGUY]

I had an Atari 800 and my best friend Chris has an Atari 1200XL, he has my 800 now and we had those annoying cassettes and what a pain it was to load a game.

Thank GOD for disk drives, Both of us had Indus GT floppy drives and he said if he can find some cheap he would buy at least 2 more.