Flashback!

Once more we will journey back to the olden days.  This ditty is actually dated and the date is February 1, 1983.  Just days before the 30th birthday.

In those days there were no hard drives for smaller machines and floppies were pretty rare and they held a massive 256,000 bytes.  Let's also not forget that they measured a full 8 inches across.

The mass storage device was magnetic tape.  We've all seen the computers in the movies where the tape spools and going back and forth.  In some ways, this was accurate.

I wrote a magtape (as it was known) driver a couple of times and if you gave it enough resources you could write 20 mega-bytes per minute.  Not too shabby in its day.

The song is sung to the tune of Rawhide, a popular TV show of that era.  Let's jump in and get a bit western.  Don't forget to sing in a lusty voice.

Magtape

Rollin',  Rollin',  Rollin'
Rollin',  Rollin',  Rollin'

Rollin',  Rollin',  Rollin'

Magtape

Rollin',  Rollin',  Rollin'

Through the buffers flowin'

Keep those tape reels rollin'

Magtape

Noise and interference,

show my perseverance,

Allowing the bytes to DMA

All the bytes I'm savin',

Won't be misbehavin'

Allowing an accurate replay.

Queue 'em up, sort 'em out,

Sort 'em out, queue 'em up,

Sort 'em out,  Magtape.

Splice 'em in, send 'em out,

Send 'em out, Splice 'em in,

Queue 'em up, Magtape.

Roll to the end of Magtape.

I'm queuin' queuin' queuin',

Though I'm disapprovin,

What's this user doin?

Magtape.

Don't ever try to append 'em,

Just buffer, queue and send 'em,

I'll be rewinding by and by.

The user's calculatin',

My files he'll be updatin',

be updatin', God knows why.

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'
Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'

Magtape