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Chuck Guzis remembers:
The Weight leads me to a very funny anecdote regarding the early days ofthe system. Durango hired
a firm to conduct the advertising campaing and sent over an early prototype of the system for photographs.
The advertising campaign was to show an attractive woman holding the system to illustrate its compact size.
After trying a few professional models who were absolutely incapabile of lifting the unit off the table,
the advertising agency finally found a suitable victim in Durango's marketing department. Galyn was
an extremely attractive young woman, but very tall and quite muscular (she came from a military family).
She could lift the system, but for only a few seconds at a time. This was long enough for a photo
to be taken however.
When the photos were developed however, it became obvioius that Gayln was under consdierable strain in
spite of the smile on her face. The veins in her neck and forehead could clearly be seen to be bulging.
However, some darkroom magic removed the offending features and the ad campaign had its photos.
Testimony from Peter Breitenfeld:
I purchased an F85 in 1979 for my company after
having visited famous German Hannover Fair shortly before. The machine was
delivered by some sales people near Hamburg, Germany, on May 29, 1979. The
Durango Representative Germany was located near Stuttgart or Munich. It
cost 15,600 € net of VAT.
The F85 was my choice, because I had to produce print-outs some 210
characters in width, and at that time, only very few printers, if any,
were capable of A3 landscape format at 210 cpi.
Some years later I added another used F 85 at 3,400 € and a used
external Dual Floppy Drive at DEM 7,000. Eventually I added a 4-port
serial interface to the first computer, 950 € in all, I think. This was
a fortune at that time!
All hardware was in use until the late 80's or early 90's, when the first
XT-compatibles turned up.
At that time, I wrote a transfer program to send all data via the serial
interface to our XT, because the floppy format was not compatible with any
other drives. AND IT DID WORK FINE!
I found the F85 the Mercedes Benz amongst other competitors. You should
have seen how all boards, parts and things were assembled by torx screws!
Solid Aluminium inside, everything designed for heavy duty use. No cheap
plastic stuff.
Printings were crisp and clear.
I wrote all programs myself, first in Durango Basic, which came along with
the machine.
Then I up-graded to Star-Basic, which included ISAM, Sequential and Random
File Manager, and a Compiler. This was EXCELLENT software at that time. I
even programmed my own word processor.
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