One thing that all computers do in some form is store data, be it programs we install on them, or data we generate ourselves using these programs. This is, of course, by design – computers are tools to help us do work (or at least, that’s why they are made, whether or not we use them for such.) These days our data is stored on hard disks, flash storage, or written to optical media like a CD or a DVD, but back in the 80’s it was all about floppy discs and audio tape. Yes, audio tape.
Generally, the classic microcomputers of the 80’s had methods built into their basic to save to these different media, and users took good advantage of this. In those days, you may use a single floppy for, let’s say, business documents, another for personal documents, and what have you. Today, we would probably just set up different folders on our machine for such, but the idea is the same, and while it seems simple and obvious to us today, back in those days the idea that you could store this information, seemingly magically, was a new concept, as with most anything relating to computers.
Enjoy this look back 30 years to how we used to store our computer data. no “Control+S” here, and the only floppy disc you saw wasn’t a handy save icon, it was the actual floppy you put in the machine to save to, which, without this handy button, you had to put in an arcane code, such as “Save “Data”,8″.
Microcomputers are strange things to a modern computer user when you think about it.