It's Saturday night, once again, but long gone are the days of my youth and the Saturday night disk-co parties. Yeah, disk-co parties where when a few of my geeky friends and I would get together, combine our 1541 disk drives, and copy floppy disks from each other's collections until the wee hours in the morning.

Many of these disk-co parties were during my college years, but even after I was old enough to go to the bars and taverns, I wasn't a drinker. So, night club-ing wasn't something I did a lot of. Many of my Saturday nights were spent watching movies and/or having fun on the C128. Fortunately, I did have a small group of friends who enjoyed similar activities and, every so often, we'd join forces for a disk-co party.

I never could afford to splurge on a second 1541 until well into the mid 90s, and neither did my Commodore buddies. So, the disk copying get togethers were a great way to grow our floppy disk collections quickly, as we'd be able to pool our Commodore resources and binge copy during an evening of eating pizza and watching movies. Those were some fun times, and you know, I strangely miss those days when copying games actually took time and effort. I think, having to go through that process (unlike today where everything instantly available and takes no effort at all to obtain) made you more appreciative of what you had back then.

One of my favorite copy programs at that time was SuperCopy 64, published by Richvale Telecommunications (a Canadian company based in Richmond-Hill, Ontario, no less). It was very easy to use and made use of a dual disk drive setup.

Later on, Loadstar released two excellent copy utilities, Star Copier and Star Nibbler. They were much faster at copying files and the Nibbler could do an entire disk copy in about three minutes. Although, it did not support dual disk drives, so you had to swap disk during the copy process. But it was much faster than most other disk copiers at the time.

Today, the process of copying disk images on a modern PC is nothing like the process you have to go through on a real Commodore 8-bit computer. But, if you're curious as to what the process was like, here's a short demo video of it using Loadstar's Star Copier and dual 1541 disk drives.

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