will old filepro work on XP computer

[Steve Bergman]

Steve Wiltsie wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com>
> To: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
> Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2006 10:33 PM
> Subject: Re: will old filepro work on XP computer
>
>
>   
> That's because they were 8" diskettes, not 8 1/2".   And yes, I've seen/used
> a lot of them - but that was a long, long time ago.
>
>   
The most primitive machine I've ever worked on had dual 8 inchers in an
external cabinet.  It was a Wang something-or-other mini/micro from the
mid seventies.  It looked like a briefcase and had a separate serial
console and a printer running over god only knows what protocol.  It was
one of those affairs with BASIC in ROM like the old Apple II, but the OS
was far more primitive than Apple DOS.  This thing made the old Tandy
Business Systems with their 8 inch floppies look like HAL9000.  The
filesystem did not support the concept of storing files in noncontiguous
blocks.  So if you want to edit a program, you load it into memory and
make your changes using the handy-dandy line editor.  Then you save it.
However, if the number of blocks increases and you have saved another
file in the blocks after  the ones it uses, you must "scratch" the file
and re-save it.  It will then get saved after that file's blocks that
were in the way.  But if there are not enough blocks, you have to get a
new 8 inch diskette and put it in the second drive.  Then there is a
button on the floppy drive cabinet that you push and it takes all the
files on diskette 1 and copies them contiguously to disk 2, thereby
defragmenting it.  When the operation is complete, you can take disk 2
and move it to drive 1 and proceed to save your file.

It ran an entire accounting and payroll system for a road construction
company and did so for many, many years.  One day, well into the
"Windows Era", the owners decided it was time to upgrade.  So... our
company found an emulator for its hardware and OS that ran under DOS, if
you can believe that, and we moved the whole application over to a PC.
(I was flabbergasted that such an emulator actually existed.)  I haven't
heard from them in years.  But even before, the only time I *ever* heard
from them was once a year when it was time to go in and modify the
payroll tax tables which were hard-coded in basic.