In order to teach BASIC to a class of students without buying one Altair clone for each of them, I need to use Multi-User BASIC so I can run three terminals off each computer. But for the purposes of teaching the elements of computing I prefer to have the students boot from paper-tape after toggling in a boot-loader. That is, I intend to conceal from the students the existence of the MBL prom and the existence of the disk drives. So, my question is: can Multi-User BASIC run without the disk-drive?
I know it lacks the CLOAD and CSAVE commands so we'd have to figure out another way to save programs (listing them to the paper-tape punch is the obvious solution) but I suspect that the problem is worse than that and Multi-User BASIC actually needs the floppy-disk as part of its operation. Does anyone know if that's true? If it is, does anyone know if there's another solution that would enable me to have six simultaneous users of BASIC on two Altairs without using the floppy-disk?
Gabriel Egan