What did you prefer: cassettes or 5¼" floppies?

[NorthWay]

I got a 1541 and never looked back. Though I'd probably prefered a turning lock instead of a push down tab to lock down the floppy, if I had known there were other configs.
In my collection I have 8", 5.25", 3.5", 3" and 1.8" (IIRC - from an Apricot I think) plus a Zip disk but no Iomega (I have the 35G drive itself). Oh, and a magnetic tape from an IBM mainframe and a coupla more tape types.

[Spector]

I've put a poll on this topic because there seems to be a lot of answers either way. I've started things off by voting for tapes

[The Laird]

I hated tape loading, it was the main reason I got an Atari 2600.

When I moved to the Atari ST I never looked back, I loved using disks. Especially being able to do my college on my ST at home and then load it up on the PCs there.

[Crusty Starfish]

Cassettes for me. Could go make a coffee, toast some bread, walk the dog and do the washing up just in time for the game to load. (or just sit and listen to the generally excellent loading music on the C64).

[Arnie]

I guess now that would depend on the machine I'm using. In my early days with the ZX Spectrum it was cassette as there was no real standard of floppy drive available until much later with the +3, but by then I'd moved on to the Amiga 500.
On the C64 I guess either way as unless a speed loader was used even floppy was slow, I've not experience commercial releases on disk to judge them but at least most cassette game played nice music whilst you wait.
Atari 8bit would have to be disk, my experience of loading from tape finds it to be dreadfully slow. Head over Heels must be on a c30 or more just for one game.
Acorn BBC disk all the way if the software was available. The beeb works so well with a drive even when shared over its network connection.

[Antiriad2097]

Its worth bearing in mind that most tape games, especially on C64, used speedloaders too. A c64 game at normal speed takes 20-30 minutes to load off tape. Speccy is faster, but even that uses speedloaders in later games.

Using modern tech (like an iPod/MP3/WAV player), its possible to get a much cleaner signal than analogue tape, so speedloaders can reach silly levels. I had Skool Daze speedloading on my Atmos in well under 1 minute, faster than most of the disk drives of the day for 8 bit systems.

[kiwimike]

Well I voted for Big floppy, and I did it with the same smile on my face as when I turn to Uranus in a book on Planets. Proving I may be old but still as immature as censored

[Back in Time Sime]

Like most I had a cassette player for my Commodore 64 and just dreamed of one day having disks... playing Summer Games II was great, again though always dreaming of how quick it would be on disk, imagine being able to save your world records... Multi Load was a real pain in the butt, and reading a review in Zzap!64 where they said they where reviewing the disk version, you knew on cassette you where in for pain... Little Computer People was so cut down... eventually I got a disk drive and it was as amazing as I had hoped.

Disks do indeed rulz

[Treguard]

I only ever had Cassettes before getting an Amiga. I was only a kid and couldn't afford the ridiculous price for a disk drive as advertised from mail order companies in Amstrad Action, next to the Romantic Robot ad.

[gunbladelad]

I always used tapes back in the day - but with the advent of the floppy disc, loading became much faster. Still, it's always good to be able to start loading a game, go and make a cuppa and take your time coming back to the game.

[Spector]

Looking at the answers, it's clearly dependant on what computer you had. It it were an Atari 8 bit, then disks were better cause tapes took three years to load. The C64 wasn't much better till later on when turbos brought load times under six minutes. With the Spectrum though - the best micro for tape loading ever - it was clearly the best option, as games loaded fairly quickly, plus the school playground C90 culture gave you a library of games for next to nothing.

[Sephiroth81]

Looking at the answers, it's clearly dependant on what computer you had. It it were an Atari 8 bit, then disks were better cause tapes took three years to load. The C64 wasn't much better till later on when turbos brought load times under six minutes. With the Spectrum though - the best micro for tape loading ever - it was clearly the best option, as games loaded fairly quickly, plus the school playground C90 culture gave you a library of games for next to nothing.

Its the best option if you couldn't afford a C64, and preferred immense sprite flicker and an amazing 4 colours on screen at once as well as ear piercing bleep-bleep audio.

[Spector]

Looking at the answers, it's clearly dependant on what computer you had. It it were an Atari 8 bit, then disks were better cause tapes took three years to load. The C64 wasn't much better till later on when turbos brought load times under six minutes. With the Spectrum though - the best micro for tape loading ever - it was clearly the best option, as games loaded fairly quickly, plus the school playground C90 culture gave you a library of games for next to nothing.

Its the best option if you couldn't afford a C64, and preferred immense sprite flicker and an amazing 4 colours on screen at once as well as ear piercing bleep-bleep audio.

When I saw you replied, I just knew it was a wind up!

[Sephiroth81]

Looking at the answers, it's clearly dependant on what computer you had. It it were an Atari 8 bit, then disks were better cause tapes took three years to load. The C64 wasn't much better till later on when turbos brought load times under six minutes. With the Spectrum though - the best micro for tape loading ever - it was clearly the best option, as games loaded fairly quickly, plus the school playground C90 culture gave you a library of games for next to nothing.

Its the best option if you couldn't afford a C64, and preferred immense sprite flicker and an amazing 4 colours on screen at once as well as ear piercing bleep-bleep audio.

When I saw you replied, I just knew it was a wind up!

I couldn't let your trolling go without some retaliatory trolling!

[Spector]

Hmm, I didn't think it was trolling. I just assumed everyone accepted that because the Spectrum was quickest at loading tapes without sacrificing reliability, and the coloured loading bars gave you a good indication of anything that was wrong. So are there people here in the know who think the C64 or the (gasp!) Atari 8 bit are better for tapes??