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| * | DISK-O-TAPE By Dann McCreary. For the Apple II and II plus, Pascal edition. Transfer an entire disk to tape in a single bound! Thanks to Dirk B. for the gift! |
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The following is an e-mail I received on 14/DEC/2011 from Dann McCreary, the author of the above products:
Hello Antoine, It is good to hear from you. Thank you for the courtesy of your reply! :) Thank you also for the link to the other Disk-O-Tape files. :) Back in the late '70s and early '80s I was trying hard to market the programs I had written, but I was always a better coder than a marketeer. Apple-80 and Cosapple were actually disk images but as a shoe-string sales operation, I sometimes shipped them on self-booting cassette tapes made in the Disk-O-Tape format. My unique idea was that using a single-line typed into the Apple ][ monitor (*200.240R) the first audio track on the tape was loaded and run, and subsequently would bootstrap the rest of the disk image into place on a formatted 5 1/4" floppy disk. This was in the day when a 128K byte diskette cost about $5 but you could get three cassette tapes for $1, so the cost savings was quite a bit. :) Most of my sales came from press releases published in the various computer magazines, like Byte, Kilobaud, SoftTalk, Compute!, and others... but the sales from those releases enabled me to do a little bit of advertising later in some of the same magazines. However, sales never reached a level that would allow me to become "self-sustaining" and so I was never able to quit my "day job" and write independent software full time. I had a very disappointing experience when I chose Sybex over another software publisher to market my Apple-80 program; Sybex really messed up the documentation when they re-printed it, and consequently I was horrified to read some very bad reviews of my software resulting from Sybex messing things up... I no longer have an Apple ][, but I may have one or two archived copies of some tapes and/or some documentation. No promises, but just supposing I were able to find some of that - if I were to mail a cassette to you, could you possibly recover the data and post the results on your site? I think you are doing a service by archiving some of this software from "the good old days" and making it available to hobbyists. :) I also wonder if you might be interested in some of the nicer "fan mail" that I got from users of my programs? :) The market back in the day was pretty hungry for software; I am sure that some of my sales were simply because there was not too much available at all, and some people were just curious. But I also think that I would have done a much bigger business if I had tried to make some computer games (like Scott Adams adventure programs) or if I had listened to a friend's advice and written a good word processor for the Apple. Nevertheless, I am still a working engineer and designer, and still very thankful for God's kindness to me through the years. I still invent things and try to market them. For the past ten years my cousin and I have been designing and building the core technology for Viametrics, a people-counting company based in Sweden. http://viametrics.com Well Antoine, that's probably lots more than you wanted to hear... :) Thank you again for writing, and please keep in touch from time to time! :) With kind regards, -Dann