31. 1541 Test/Demo Diskette
Before becoming ubiquitous in an era of shareware, magazine pack-ins, and AOL direct-mail marketing, demo diskettes were commonly included with Commodore peripherals as a showcase of what '80s home computing hardware could accomplish. There are multiple variants of test/demo diskettes for the 1541 floppy disk drive, including one that I recently received as a gift from my brother. Let's take a look at the disk's contents and explore some of the software that was provided to Commodore's user base.
The naming of this disk is somewhat of misnomer as a large portion of its content consists of utility programs. Running a LOAD "$", 8 reveals a generous list of software designed to test the features of the 1541 floppy drive, perform various maintenance tasks, and demonstrate common programming techniques.
A CBM DOS wedge utility is one of the most essential tools to make life easier for 1541 users, and Commodore was smart enough to include their own utility to compete with the wide variety of third-party wedges available to power-users. A utility called Uni-Copy is included to copy files between two disk drives, along with a simpler (and slower) single-disk backup/copying utility. We also get some low-level disk maintenance tools, such as a utility to change the load address of a program on a disk, an "unscratch" or un-delete utility, and a utility to change the name of the disk as listed in the disk header. A BAM (Block Availability Map) viewer allows access to an area of a disk similar to a File Allocation Table (FAT) that the DOS uses to identify blocks that have been assigned to files on the disk. The selection of 1541 tools is rounded out with a utility to view the content of individual tracks/sectors, a disk-checking utility (note that this utility actually wipes the disk in the process of stress-testing it, which will likely defeat the purpose of checking for errors), and a disk drive performance/diagnostic utility.
Commodore also accommodates floppy-curious software developers with "seq.file.demo" and rel.file.demo", two programs that are included to be used as guidelines when writing programs that work with the disk drive. These notably include the technique of checking the error channel after each access to the disk drive (I'm not sure why Commodore was so excited about this, but they specifically mention it in the "how to use" introductory spiel, so it must have been important to them).
Non-1541 odds and sods include a graphical printer test intended to show off the capabilities of the 1525, MPS-801 and MPS-803 models, a screen-dumping/variable-dumping utility (I wonder if this would've come in handy for novice software pirates in search of the perfect trainer?), and a set of demo programs designed to test basic system functionality and demonstrate rudimentary graphics and sound capabilities.
It's also important to note that while the 1541 is mainly thought of as a companion to the Commodore 64, there's some content on the disk for VIC-20 devotees, as well as a few selections intended for the ill-fated Commodore +4 computer. These inclusions also help date the period in which this revision of the diskette was released: the +4 was released in mid-1984, while the VIC-20 was discontinued by January 1985, which makes it more likely (though not a sure thing) that this is a late 1984 release.
I was curious to see how some of the disk-drive-specific utilities stacked up when compared to more modern third-party utilities designed for this purpose, but running these utilities (or even LISTing the utilities' BASIC source) reveal them to be a little threadbare. The demos are unfortunately very simplistic, feeling like less of a tech demo and more of a BASIC programming assignment - the "hash" screen-test is nothing more than a "+" character with a GOTO loop, and the color-bar demo isn't much more impressive. The disk drive demo does nothing but format and test a disk, both simple commands in BASIC. Finally, in what is becoming a recurring complaint, almost all of the utilities that I tested are hard-coded to use drive number 8 and do not work in other drive number assignments unless the program itself is altered. This lack of attention to detail indicates that these programs may have been intended more as documentation of the drive's functions than any serious attempt to create tools that would see everyday usage.
To put a positive spin on this assessment, Commodore's bare-bones approach is less damning if you picture this software being presented to new, isolated computer users that didn't have other options at hand. The combination of utilities, test programs, and demos on a single disk was likely helpful to novice 1541 owners in the early days when content like drive-specific programming examples was rarely available online or in print form. However, given decades of knowledge-sharing and the slew of superior utilities and demos that followed from the Commodore community, the disk is relegated to the status of historical curiosity and isn't illustrative of the C64 or 1541's true capabilities.
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