>>Didn't the Wangs use the hard sectored disks with the holes so it could find the sectors?
>>
>>Funny things that pop into the mind ...
>
>Yes .. I remember the concept of sectors on those disks. Wang Basic didn't have the concept of indexes on the data .. we just told it to go to a certain sector on the disk and read the data. Or we could sequentially read through each sector .. but we certainly couldn't tell it to go find a particular record.

That's true. I did my own kind of indexing. I was packing data to get more onto a single disk and knew how many records I was storing per sector for a given table.

The worst was that you had to allocate file space up front and if you guessed wrong about how large a file would turn out to be, it was a big hassle. I eventually wrote a configuration program that asked the user what the maximum number of records for each of a number of quantities would be. I created the files based on 1.5 * the number specified.

Tamar