🚀 go-pugleaf

Re the discussion of mice problems.  I had problems with mine and, rather than
getting it overhauled or whatever, I replaced it with a mouse that was
surplus from work.  Some years back we got some Xerox dandelions that
originally came with 2-button mice.  At that time we replaced the mice with
3-button optical mice.  I recently took an old 2-button Xerox mouse home
and built a adapter cable (appropriate pins-to-pins, no electronics) and
it works just fine on my 1040.  This also means that the 3 button optical
mice that we had for the Xerox machines would work as well.  (We also use
these mice on our Symbolics machines but we have a small converter box as
the signals are inverted.  So Symbolics mice would require some electronics
to run on the Atari.)

On another topic, I recently needed to buy some floppies late on the
weekend and so ran off to a discount store.  They were out of the kinds
I had used before so I bought some that were called BONUS (made by
Verbatim).  However, I have had repeated problems with the Atari
claiming that the write-protect is set for them when it wasn't.  It
doesn't always happen but it happened a number of times on different
disks.  I didn't notice it happening on my other brands of disks (which
I was also writing onto at about the same time).  Admittedly I was doing
the majority of writing at about those times with the BONUS disks.  As I
understand it, the write-protect is set if the window on the disk is
open.  I don't understand any mechanism by which one brand of disk could
mislead the Atari into thinking that the disk was write protected when I
can see that it wasn't.  So, it must be something flaky with my Atari
rather than the disks.  But I have used written onto another set of
disks (different brand) since then and didn't have the problem again but
then I did have the problem when I was writing to one of the BONUS
disks.  I know it seems crazy but is there some way the disks are at
fault or am I just being laughed at by the gods of coincidence.


[P.S.  If anyone out there cares, I do have a version of SUPDUP that I run
to talk to my Symbolics from home.  I dial up to a Vax and then telnet
from there to the Symbolics on the SUPDUP port and have my Atari speak SUPDUP
to it.  Graphics are not implemented.  I haven't tried it with any SUPDUP
host (eg, SAIL) other than a Symbolics.]