Copying files - it ain't like what it used to be ...

Memories - source Wikipedia
I make no secret of entering this profession through the indelicate route of spending anti-social hours on a ZX81 then Spectrum. The image to the right sums up my experiences and the quality technical environment afforded to many in the early 1980's.

Running my own sweaty little piracy ring - we lacked high tech dubbing equipment. Armed with cheap C90 cassettes - we would find ways of copying each others games using "The Key".

Using one cassette player, each block of the came would be loaded into memory before being dumped verbatim onto another cassette. It was possible for one single copy to take anything up to 30 minutes to complete. This was for anything up to 32K (yes kilobytes) of machine code.

Nowadays, I can transfer a gigabyte of data into cloud storage to be replicated across multiple devices in minutes. Stream multi-megabyte videos while downloading a variety of other data formats. We have kind of forgotten the pace and space taken by such small amounts of data.

Copying files - it ain't like what it used to be ...

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