How old school cassette tape drives worked
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 มิ.ย. 2016
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In this episode we take an in depth look at what life was like using cassette drives for storage on computers during the 1970's and 1980's.
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I actually love the idea of reading data off tape, even if slow, flawed, etc.. because it literally merges the world of audio & computer science.
Read up on the early phreakers. Joybubbles was only seven and blind and got into AT&Ts network system by producing a tone at exactly 2600hz. Then you had Captain Crunch who discovered the whistle in the cereal produced the same tone. Manipulating the automated system to get free long distance calls was a huge deal then!
In fact, everything in the universe is made out of vibrations and interactions between those vibrations. Its amazing.
Tape drives are still in use. Mainly for backups and archives in businesses. The capacity of the specialised tapes is in at least the hundreds of gigabytes, with manufacturers reporting prototypes over 100TB.
The idea was all well and good. Like a big warm fuzzy. As a practical tool well not so much. Too easily corrupted and slooooooow. Personally I dumped my tapedrive as soon as I could afford to do so and moved up to 8 inch floppy disks. 500K of data storage baby, Whew.
I use to use this method of the Knock Dial Hack back in the 80's to make free calls from the payphone at my high school. Came in handy on rainy days when I needed a ride home or was getting a ride with friends after school.
Seeing a game load from headphone jack is blowing my mind haha
Modern Smartphones do have headphone jack
My Hauwei P Smart 2020 has a headphone jack
@@stephensnell1379 bitch, did i say they didnt? Mine does too. But i have a weird phone.
Its less and less common now. Not more and more. Iphones for example if you heard of those... Lol
@@stephensnell1379 you must be a bot
@@joshuanorris5860 what do you expect from a thing that can't say 'huawei' w.o errors
@@mibbleyt yeah hes probably a bot and i was talking to myself lol
Weird cuz those phones arent even sold in NA as far as i know lol
Its a china phone....
They probably hired black market advertising for pennies on the dollar lol idk
4:47 Playing Ultima IV on my //e is one of my fondest memories from my freshman year in college. I had a "de-protected" copy with no instructions, no table of reagents for spells, and no World Wide Web. So, I searched the disks with a sector editor for the string "FAILED", disassembled the code around it, found the subroutine call that I assumed checked for success and replaced it with NOPs, rebooted, and it was unlimited spells from then on. :-) (Switched my major from Physics to Computer Science the following year.) Funny how a couple seconds of title screen can bring back so much. Thanks!
Quest of the Avatar
I did the same thing
Neat!
Back in the 80's Danish Radio would transmit software for cassette drives late at night. They would tell you which computer it was intended for - and they actually endorsed recording with a hifi tape deck - only it should be recorded at about +3 dB ...
I can imagine tourists getting confused and terrified when the radio in their car/hotel and they hear a dutch voice be like TURN YOUR COMPUTER ON and then follow it with the loud af sounds of data spikes
@@cardioandfriends... dutch? Danish Radio speaks danish
Thanks for having me on for this one! Really fun topic, tapes are downright fascinating in their clunky versatility :)
+DoomMan899 Just don't.
That would be one HUGE roll of paper tape.... like, as big as an average closet.
oh god
***** That'd be the only worthwhile use of it.
***** The way you're continuing this convo makes me violently uncomfortable
7:38 i remember here in Uruguay we had a radio station with a program about computer games in the middle of the 80's.. i had the spectrum 64k.. so at the very end of the program they told us to connect the radio to our computer and load the program.. i remember this as the first time i saw someone sharing something with me wireless.. was really cool!
AGUANTE LOCAAAA!!! JAJAJAJ
musikdoktor someone probably tuned in to it during that and was confused
for sure.. LOL that's alien comunication..
yep, same thing here in Italy in 1984
that's fucking amazing
I still have a tape in my drawer with programs for the Vic-20 I wrote when I was kid. It managed to survive the great purge that happened when my dad upgraded to an Apple. Anyhow I recently recorded it into my PC and digitized it, and thru all the bitrot managed to recover the original programs. Then I ran them on VICE =)
What programs did you run?
Man, those were the days! When I was a kid, I was a designer in a C=64 scene group, and even designed stuff for other teams from the world. Then I grew up, and continued my chore on different platforms. Long live commodore!
Well modern day Computers are just simply so fantastic and can store lots of data
7:40 - Years ago, some amateur radio stations in Poland were sending signal through radio waves so you were able to record games and software on your tape and run on computer.
I was wondering about the exact thing - a pirate radio broadcasting lines of codes to teenagers? Cool af.
I believe the BBC did this at various quiet hours during the night. My Grandfather (who worked at the BBC in their research department at the time) told me all about it...
National Danish radio for a short while had a show that did exactly this. The software was user submitted programs for various platforms, C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad. Presented by the host, then broadcast. A treat for a geek, and I suspect horrific for anyone else.
There was a radio show in the UK that used to 'broadcast' software this way. I don't recall if it was a BBC station or not, but yes, it existed. Since they weren't broadcasting commercial games, it was not so popular, I guess. I think the generic term is 'telesoftware'. There was also a method of sending programs across the air via the TV, the same as we in the UK received 'Teletext'. I think it needed some form of hardware adapter, and one such was available for the BBC Micro.
Yes, this was also available in Yugoslavia too.
"Typing in games from magazines, yes that was a thing we did."
Damn right we did. :)
Shane Martins They even published *BOOKS* full of type-in BASIC games. My VIC-20's RAM expansion and Datasette got a workout from those programs. ;)
My dad told me, that the very library i went to for my entire childhood, and which is still my local library, hosted plenty of books and game codes when he was young. I am so, so jealous of him. Even though he had a VIC-20. We saw one on ebay the other day, real cheap. He commented on it and said; "Why would you buy that? Take the parts out and make a breadbin out of it?" (This was in danish, so it waasn't a pun on the original C64.)
Also scanning programs printed in Byte magazine as barcodes, using a homebuilt "light pen" made from plans published in Byte, and a (short) program typed in the first time from the magazine to run the scanning process. If not for the internet and cheap floppy disks and CD-ROM disks, that format would have stuck around longer.
In 1983, I spent a week typing in "Speedscript", a C-64 word processor. Get this - I used it to create a college paper, printed it with a dot-matrix printer. The professor REJECTED it, saying "Everyone else had to use a typewriter. You had an unfair advantage." Yes, I was hacked and salty for days.
RUNDY
ever seen that every day?
2:27 its my favorite song! [CANNOT LOAD DISK] by [ERROR]
Oh hell yeah, that ones a head banger for sure
2:09 that “prepping” the tape was a memory I didn’t realize was still in my brain. The struggles were real.
And you would have to blank record a few seconds if you reused it to avoid having an old header on it/ double start.
great video. thanks for having me on the show!
Ayy
lol
Back when defragmentation involved a pair of scissors and some sticky tape.
LOL
you did that thank god I was to young for that shit by the time I got a pc it had first dos 7 and windows 3.11 with tab works god I miss that old system and then got upgraded to windows 95 and had defrag as part of windows 95
hope you where the lucky guy to rent the vhs tapes I rented watched and returned without rewinding for you
Even I as an early 2000s kid remember fixing my audio cassettes like that
If you ain't splicing, you ain't living.
I did that with a reel to reel in 1993 Media Studies. It was called splicing. Was cool.
When I was in 5th grade (1985-1986), the teacher had a pair of TI99/4A computers in the back of the classroom connected to a pair of 12" B&W TVs. They weren't school property; they belonged to him, so they were the only TI99/4As in the school. He had a tape drive, which was just an ordinary "shoebox" style tape recorder, which connected with analog cables. The only program I ever remember him loading from it was some text adventure game, which he'd sometimes set up for us to play during break or recess when we stayed inside due to the weather. He had Parsec too, but that was on a ROM cartridge.
2:47 "Hopefully that will focus" Camera:**Doesn't focus**
I remember back in late 80s, we used to watch a British tv show about computers. at the end, they would broadcast noise, which you can record on tape and play it on the computer. the old version of download :)
I remember hearing how the BBC radio would transmit a program over the radio for people to record onto tape and use with their BBC Micro computer.
what was it called?
Look for DATABASE in ThamesTv channel, they used to broadcast data at the end th-cam.com/video/szdbKz5CyhA/w-d-xo.html
the piratebay of the 80s
A wireless download XD
I find it amusing that there are people that don't know how tapes worked.
I find it more amusing that Beaker can say more than Meep Meep Meep.
Decades of intensive speech therapy.
I'm 30, and leaving in a Country where you didn't had much access to technology. And my first entertaining device was Atari 2600 but this, that looked a little bit like knight rider, smaller, 4 button. etc.
And then NES, and finally in 1996 we got a PC, Windows 95, Pentium 120,16 MB Edo ram.
In my small town of 25 thousand people my family was the second one who got such a machine.
So Born 1986, never had the chance to access a tape device.
Remember only once, when we had NES, and I saw this device by my cousin, he told me we can play about in like 20 minutes, I was like OH MAN!
Then he started it, and something happened - don't know what, but it broke after 5 and he had to start again.
He told me don't touch it, don't even breath on it LOL.
After the first attempt we gave up, and gone to play outside :)
What's a cassette? /jk
I'm in my 30s but since data cassettes were already dying in the US when I was young I didn't even know they existed here. I knew tape reels were around in the 60s-70s but had no idea data cassettes even existed until recently watching TH-cam. Audio cassettes I was well aware of.
Like how Kirk says: "A primitive computer" while it being all new technology back in 1966. :)
It was a damn clever moment that.
It's funny because it's actually a primitive computer now
The best parts of Star Trek were when the crew would come into contact with something from our time, their distant past-there’s some wonderful bits in Star Trek IV: The Journey Home where Bones is appalled at surgical practices of the time and, of course, Scotty’s famous “Hello, computer” scene
1:53 For reference a Single Disk Drive for the Aquarius Home Computer (a budget home computer) cost $150 USD in 1983, that's about $448 today. The compact cassette recorder was only $79.95 at the time, $239 in today's money.
so basically typing the game code was more challenging than the game itself?.........seems legit
Game developing in a nutshell
No, you shouldve seen some of these games. Totally impossible.
Yes, and that was the idea. Every computer user was a hacker, programmer. The simple things made us feel very accomplished. A simple wire mesh 3d rendering was totally awesome, so we were able to accomplish awesome things. Today's kids are overwhelmed by awesomeness they can only buy and never hope to produce themselves from scratch.
Always
It's how many of us learned touch typing. :D
I have a few audio cassettes. But I didn't know there's such thing as data cassettes. Good work!
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Very Interesting.
@@RussTech125 I would say my phone accidentally commented for me. I have no memory of - or reason to - answer a comment with just a Z.
you make me feel so old. The day I wrote a program (10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"; 20 END) and I recordered into a tape, turned off the computer and once on again I could load it back, well... I remember my entire life changed. It was 1986 and I was 6...
Well to the computer it is not specifically labeled as data. Analog input reads from tape directly and converts it to bytes of data. These bytes can point to a piece of music, or it can be pure binary data that is actually a game or some program. As David pointed out in the video, the computer just listens for analog data, it doesn't matter where its coming from or what it actually is
I love how immediately your ears are assaulted as soon as Ms. Pac Man starts hahaha
I remember loading Oregon Trail on cassette tape in my school. Usually the teachers would do that because it took so long to load, then we all got into groups to make our wagons and let out on the old deadly dusty trail. I'm old.
I love these videos. Keep them up, iBook Guy!
*EDIT:* whoops forgot 8-Bit Guy!
yotam fan spotted!
way310 haha yep. My profile pictures have been his artwork for 3 years (I've changed it up on his birthday each time).
iBook guy forever!
Grant Fitzsimmons Has it ever been a disney gif?
way310 nope but I've seen quite a few
There was another thing no one remembers of. In some parts of germany for example you could receive pirate radio FM stations that were sending tape games right over FM every weekend... ;-) So you could simply just record them from radio and play them ^o^. I was about 10 when i heard about it in 1987/88. But i dont know exactly how long they did that.
000jimbojones000 wow, FM radio gaming piracy. That's the most retro-futuristic thing I've ever heard.
MagicAccent haha you're cute!
MMM, this was cool :-)
lol have still some recorded tapes from that era.
It was very popular in Poland
Around 1978 I purchased a ( 4K ) TRS-80 COLOR COMPUTER...
I read the big thick books you could purchase from RadioShack to program “basic and extended basic” ...
I purchased several different home computer magazines including the TRS 80 color computer magazine....
Like you said in the back they had all kinds of programs you could stay up all night typing and could play the next day... I would use a RadioShack cassette deck and load programs into it.... if you were lucky the tape would not have a glitch and it would load properly...! I got pretty good at understanding how this computer worked inside. To the point that I turned it into 832K color computer by stacking and soldering memory chips...! I even changed the little square memory logo on top of the computer from 4K to 16 to32....! Watching your channel brings back lots and lots of memories of owning one of the first home computers....
( The Jeff Galey channel )
Him: sticks a data cassette into a tape player
Me: sticks a music cassette into the tape drive
On some computers, you could actually play the music.
Commodore VIC 20: AM I A JOKE TO YOU!?!?!?!?
@@WildDiamond07 Apple II: me poco loco
XD
They didn't have speaker
There was a Dutch radio project in the 80s called BASICODE. What they did is made a version of BASIC that would be compatible on every popular home computer, from the Apple II to the ZX Spectrum and the Atari XL line to the C64. They then aired BASICODE programs over the air that you could record on a tape deck, and then you could use that program on your computer. The programs were basically computer agnostic.
Gotta say, I really like seeing other TH-camrs weigh in on these videos, especially because I know most people you get on here, like Clint and CGQ.
Basicode was awesome!
You needed a Basicode interpreter for your specific system, though. The interpreter then would translate the Basicode broadcast to something your computer could understand. Basicode was the Esperanto for home computers, so to speak.
Loading a Basicode program was therefore a two step process (not including the taping of the broadcast)
1) Load the system-specific interpreter and then 2) use that interpreter to load your Basicode program.
The only drawback was that you couldn't use graphics in your programs. Text adventures were fine, but anything involving color and graphics were basically a no-go because no two systems had the same instructions for, say, drawing a line on screen.
Had Basicode in the UK as well. I remember taping it off the radio early on a Saturday morning, eagerly loading it into my Spectrum only to get a tape loading error at the end.
Oh man. Yes, I remember pirate radio shows where they would broadcast games.
No, it's pretty straight forward. Not complex at all, just a difference between high and low noises, which is all the computer is looking for, 1's and 0's. So the room for interference is quite high.
Lol, in our country, official state radio stations broadcasted those XD
manganoid ooo what country
So an iPhone can became a 64 gigabyte tape drive for the computer.
Yes, you could store the data as audio files or there are apps that can store the data in a special format then recreate audio on the fly. Or like in the video he jist accessed a website that streamed the audio files as he requested them so in theory it could be unlimited with internet access
It could be even more than that - consider an MP3 file takes up less space than an audio track on a CD. A gigabyte of any kind of storage was science fiction for home computers back then.
@@Oddman1980 But MP3 files use lossy compression, so you may be losing critical data.
I remember those days where a 10 MB hard disk drive for an 8-bit Zilog Z80 Northstar Horizon microcomputer would be a $5,000 luxury.
Yes, I store my ZX Spectrum data in icloud, so it has a back up too.
Wow, dvvid96, you must have remarkably fast internet to send us a message all the way from 2009
In the Commodore drive sits a Schmitt-Trigger behind several amplifiers. A Schmitt-Trigger detects peak values and switches either to a binary 1 or a 0 with a dead area in between. It needs a certain voltage to go high and has to fall under a certain voltage to go low.
If the head isn't aligned well, peaks aren't as high as the trigger likes it to be to react in that time the signal is on its input pin. This is especially true when using a fast loader with its narrow peaks.
I aligned one drive by connecting an oscilloscope to the amplifier output and trigger output to maximise the output. If you don't have any other way to read an alignment cassette, it's really hard to get it from tape otherwise.
The other problem can be if a tape is recorded on a misaligned drive. You have to misalign it in the same way to be able to read it again.
Having an oscilloscope also helps when adjusting misaligned floppy drives. They aren't as simple as a Schmitt-Trigger, but the principle of maximising the output signal is the same.
There actually was a German TV show which ended with a broadcast of some software and you just needed to record the audio! Computerclub was its name.
Sadly, I wasn't around at the time, I wish I could tell you! But they switched from the TV audio signal (no moderation possible) to a relatively cheap device later where they'd send software encoded within the vertical blanking interval, which meant better signal quality and the ability to broadcast software throughout the show, which was kind of ingenious methinks.
The British had it too! th-cam.com/video/szdbKz5CyhA/w-d-xo.html
... and they called the segment "Hard-Bit-Rocks"
Well I was around and it never worked for me. It also aired only for a few weeks, probably because it didn't work so well for anybody.
ComputerClub was my favorite program. I still watch CC2 on TH-cam.
Tapes are still used today, usually in data centers, for mass archival
You can store some ludicrous amount of data on the most recent iteration of the format, like 6 TB?
Yes sir those machines have 100 times the density of old vhs and move 30 times as fast and 10 feet equal about 10 gigabytes
please be kind, rewind
My Data center has an SL8500. I have the dubious task of collecting the tapes as they eject and processing them for vault storage.
Amy congratulations, that makes you a Certified Tape Librarian.
It's all toilet noises!
That sound of the old school keyboard is SOOOO satisfying....
“Tape drives” sound more like a data transfer protocol, than a storage format, given that the method of storing the audio was so varied in practice.
The other way round :) It was a fixed physical format, electrically and magnetically as well as mechanically, but the serial protocols (and speed) that was used varied heavily.
World Theory cassette tapes were the format the drive did the transfer
The tape format was HUGE in the UK. It was so cheap, I could buy two games a week with my pocket money.
I fondly remember using cassette tapes and tape drives as a kid, and now I feel really old. :(
Never been on your channel before. Fell in love the moment your opening started with an Commodore 1571 drive and a Commodore 128 computer.
I am beyond astounded. THis is some kind of wizards magic. CRAZY!!!
Well, what's so astounding? Data can be represented with anything that has states. For example, theoretically I could "write" the Super Mario ROM on a beach with crabs (0) and shellfish (1), IF I had enough time.
@11.50 - "I've never experienced games taking more than 15 minutes to load".
Fast loaders were not available in the early days of the C64, and many commercial games DID take much longer than 15 minutes to load. I can remember some games taking almost 25 minutes to load, Blue Max from Synapse Software springs to mind (great game by the way). Fast loaders started becoming more popular around 1985 or so, with games written prior to 1985 were notorious for their slow loading. Many times I would get home from school, start the computer loading a game, go and have dinner and it was STILL loading after I had finished dinner and came back!
It was mentioned that programs were aired from radio stations. How was it made exactly? The speaker said: "Please turn your casette recorder on, because now comes a program". Then they were broadcasting the screaming sound for 10 minutes?
exactly.
Tamas Ruszkai yes in the late 80's the university radio station of my city had a program called noctambulos were they talked about comics, video games, sci-fy and tecnology the talked program ended at 1 in the morning and they started streaming the game of the week so you put a blank cassete on your stereo and recorded the game that they were streaming good ol times
Tamas Ruszkai I suppose it would also be possible to directly link up the headphone jack on the radio (if it had one) to the computer, and losdthe program directly
and on BBC tech shows and the like
How did it work with the quality of the radio signal? Was that ever a problem? Because I can see how static and interference could mess the audio up
I loved those times. Back when patches were on your jeans and the future was looking good for hardware and game's.
On the C64 in the UK, cassettes were king. 2 reasons: 1) Disks were expensive at the time and 2) With a half decent hi-fi you could copy tape to tape, was especially handy if the hi-fi had fast tape recording. I got the official Commodore tape player, but I somehow ended up with an off brand that seemed to be far more reliable.
You know the videos good when LGR is a guest star.
In Poland Copyright Laws was establish in 1993 as a our transformation from comunism to capitalism system. Before that National Polish Radio was broadcasting video games on air. All of young gamers wait for this moments with theirs tape recorders to play games they couldn't get other way.
You mean established
I remember these times, we had it too in Germany. We had pirate broadcasts that didn't give a damn about copyright laws and just aired the games and apps and explained how to crack software, what was awesome at this time
The "Star Trek" episode is "Tomorrow is Yesterday", from Season 1.
I remember in some cases having to adjust the read head on the cassette drive with a small flat tip to allow clear playback.
If your azimuth alignment was off, turbo tape loaders could be a nightmare. We had to buy an alignment kit (where you stick a screwdriver in the hole in the top of the 1530) to align it properly.
That's for analog? Or is that the reason why I never had success with normal cassette recorder copies and the C64 datasettes?
I lold when Tasmania wasn't included when highlighting Australia. Haha.
Yes, we kids of the late 70s and early 80s used to have to store our programs on cassette tapes. The tapes and drives had to be treated and stored in particular environments to protect them. If not handled with care, the tapes and/or the drives would fall out of alignment and prevent the recovery of data on the them. Each of us kids had our preferred storage methods, many bordering on superstition. Mine was on the top shelf in the pantry, as it had a even temperature all year round.
Good times.
Thanks. I had the Atari 600XL with the tape drive and remember how exciting it was to get States and Capitals, my first tape game. Mostly used the tape to record BASIC programs like rainbow highway, American flag, and hangman
I remember a late 1960s color episode of “Dragnet” where a police department record keeper showed Sgt. Friday and Ofc. Gannon the then-state-of-the art large reel-to-reel computers that, based on their motion, did have random access.
Yes, they did, as computer tape drives do to this day.
It's not really "random access." A tape is linear, and to get from inch 10 to inch 3000, you have not choice but to spin the tape forward to that location.
After every so many blocks, a "file mark" is written. The hardware (tape drive itself) can count file marks, so you can do "file skip forward 36" and the drive will move ahead 36 file marks, and begin reading again.
Unlike a "hard drive" which can move the heads directly to any location; which _is_ random access.
@@josephgaviota Hmmm... I disagree with your interpretation of the term. The disk drive is certainly *better suited* to doing random access, but the phrase "random access" just means "I don't have to literally read every byte of data in order, just to get to the bytes I want". The access time with tape is *HUGE* compared to a spinning disk, though (and varies a lot depending on where the data is). And of course, RAM (guess what that stands for!) is even better suited to the task than disks. =:o}
Ah, I remember those days... I spent months in the early 1990s writing a tape-to-tape copying programme for work, so we could keep off-site copies of backups... Couldn't get it to cope properly with multi-volume data-sets (the headers were in a proprietary format that I could never fully figure out)... and then a commercial programme came out that did what we were trying to do, so my *next* job was to evaluate that. Turned out it was *slightly* slower than mine at copying single-volume "logical tapes", but since it handled multi-volume tapes just fine we cut our losses and went with it.
This is really interesting and something that sounds really cool, I've only grown up around newer tech though being a 2000 born guy
Fantastic work gathering the recordings from all the other channels. This is a real documentary!
As a child, nobody around me was tech savvy enough to explain to me that i could save my atari xe basic programs on standard audio cassettes, and didn't know where to buy the special cassettes I thought were required. I would write basic programs for a whole day, and then ... switch the computer off and loose all my "work". I don't remember exactly how and when I realised it needed no special cassettes, but I vividly remember feeling really stupid and kind of angry at my ignorant "entourage" for all the time lost.
7:50 that's so cool
I would love to watch a topic delving into the specific modulation schemes for each system.
Very cool video, as a child I owned C64 with tapedeck, and I always needed a screwdriver, I got many cassettes from various people, and there was a big problem - tape head alignment!
I just love the flexibility and inter-compatibility of tape drives ! It's so amazing to get games and software over the radio and tapes !
7:36 So if the computer really doesn't care where the sound comes from...
(proceeds to input data via a microphone and harmonica)
Whenever I think of data cassettes it always takes me back to my C64 days when I would wait fifteen minutes for a game to load and then get an error message just as it was about to finish. Absolutely infuriating!
As a kid in the '80s I tried programming about 4 times: a couple of times in Basic and partially succesful in Assembler. In Assembler the purpose was to let a stickfigure walk across the screen, sadly by some error it looked as he was hopping after one leg stayed backward :-D
Now we're 2020, I'm in my 40s and learning to programme on my VIC-20 is relaxing! :-)
Man .. I really like your videos, feels like old days when I was just a kid. 90s technologies in my country were like 80's in yours.
I have my uncle's old C64 with disk drive and cassette drive. I used to play it all the time at my grandparents' house in the early 90s. Raid on Bungeling Bay and Gauntlet II were my jams.
I feel so lucky to live in an era with 64 bit OS being standard. literally more addressable ram than you can fit into a board
You have it wrong. We were luckier because we could program cool stuff ourselves, like the simple things could be cool already. Today you are instantly overwhelmed because you can't hope to compete with the awesomeness of state of the art graphics and sound effects. So you are much more a dependent consumer.
@@guntherschadow9383 Programing doesn't exist now. GG. You do realise that the computer and it's manual was all that's needed for somebody to start programming. Now you just need notepad++ and tutorials on the internet. Nothing has changed, except that there is so much software now that people don't need to make their own software anymore. And let's not start with programs like construct or game maker, with them you could make a game extremely easy, no programing required, all you need are graphical assets and some knowledge about how the program works and compiles code. Creating is easier, people just don't want to bother, you can still do stuff yourself. P.S. Even back then you couldn't compete with state of the art shit, I'd like to see you program fucking SMB in 1983.
The whole interaction of tape and computers has always bewildered me, this is the first time it's ever made sense. Thanks for great videos that are blasts to the past just before my time of people en masse figuring this stuff out
I remember when I had my C64, Data tape deck and later the 1541 disk drive I was in my computing infantcy. The tape deck was indeed slow in loading games (give or take 5 mins depending on game) and one day I accidently discovered that if you hold play and FF together at a certain point (like driving a car when the clutch engages with the gears) the game did actually load quicker for about 10 odd seconds then the deck would get very hot but still continue to load under normal conditions. Sadly my deck DIY'ed and I later bought the 1541 Disk Drive.
my first computer!! (vic-20 with cassette drive) I honestly didn't even know it had a spot for cartridges.
We had a floppy drive with our C64, it was loud as hell but only took about 5 minutes to load.
***** Honestly it's so long ago I can't remember.
without turbo 1541 wont beat the tape both are more or less 300baud. 1541 came with a flaw from factory forcing it to send data at insane slow to be compatible with C64 which has a similar issue already out of the box. Turbos patched this in months, otherwise a disk drive wouldnt worth the investment.
More specifically, the "flaw" was in the 6522 (that's the I/O chip) shift register. The 1541 also had a 6522 (in fact, the 1541 is basically a computer in its own right, even having its own 2K of RAM, 8k to 16k of ROM, and CPU).
Anyway, both the VIC-20 and 1541 had a 6522 I/O chip. However, the flaw in the 6522's shift register could cause the serial bus to lock up when the clocks between the 6522 chips were not synchronized, so Commodore resorted to "bit banging" instead (using software instead of hardware to control the data transfer). Obviously, this is a slower method, but the VIC-20 only had 5k (unless you had a RAM expander, of course), so this didn't really make much of an impact.
The Commodore 64 had a 6526 I/O chip, which actually had a fully functional shift register, but Murphy's Law struck... due to a minor modification at the board manufacturer (to accommodate a screw hole) the high-speed wire was discarded, dooming the 1541 to slow speed once more. On top of this, the new VIC-II chip periodically interrupted the 6510 processor doing the disk drive communication, thus generating "jitter" into the timing, forcing them to slow down the data bus even MORE, to make it reliable again.
As a result, the 1541 was never upgraded to use the new, working 6526 chips - That had to wait for the 1571, and the Commodore 128, which had "Burst Mode", and a fully working pair of 6526's. A fastloader worked by overriding the Commodore serial protocol; for example, it was possible to send clocked data at a faster bit rate, as well as sending it two bits at a time by using both the clock and data wires to send data.
There were other reasons why the 1541 was so slow, but the 6522 I/O chip is the one you were talking about.
SpearM3064 Yes I remember most of the story. It was a flaw in the CIAs and they reworked serial comunication using more than one wire. I miss the detail of the C64 cia missing connection. I though both of them got the flaw. Yes, 1541 was computer on their own with a 6502 chip and 2K RAM. 1541 tend to suffer of missaligment because it knock the head each time a track error occurr as well as landing in a not existing track (lthat ocked the drive until you ask for a HW reset). To make thing worse, PSU was below the board, cocking the chips. Heat tend not only to spoil the aligment but also ROM chips tend to malfunction. I used 1541 and repaired (aligment basically) and past 2 to 3 hours is impossible to use the drive even when it is a good working unit. There were two mecha, ALPS and Mitsumi. One of them was more problematic. With 1571 most of this flaws are gone switching PSU, and ZERO track discovered without knocking. But found that: WITH OLD disks, 1541 is better at writting and formatting disks than 1571. The 1571 tend to reject the disk. But if you succed formating and writting it using a 1541, the 1571 wont complain at all. IMHO the record playback amp of the 1541 was superior. 1571 uses sort of hibrid potted module and of course less glue logic. And of course the CPM mode !!!!. Butwhen it come to a classic drive, even when it flaws, 1541 is THE drive. GEOS built in TURBO got even better performance out of the 1541, it is a rocket. I got suprised with the "speed". I Chained two 1541, one for system and one for data. Not sure if Geos changed the number automatically when the second drive was turned on or used a SW prior loading GEOS. Cant remember. Never hardwired the number on the PCB. That is sure. FANTASTIC GEAR. Cheers
It's too bad they didn't do some of the things with the 1541 that they did with the older PET 4040 drives. Did you know that one of the reasons the PET 4040 (which the 1541 is backwards-compatible with) was so much faster, is because it had *two* 6502 CPUs?
One of them drove the disk drive, GCR encoding and decoding, and buffer management, while the other ran communications, command interpretation, and file management. The processors ran on "Crossed Clocks", and had a shared area of memory, which communicated using a really cool interprocess communications signalling system.
The 1541, however, only had one CPU, using an ugly, hacked interrupt routine to switch between the two tasks. The stack was halved, and the whole thing ran a lot slower as a result.
Can you imagine how fast the 1541 could have been, if they had two CPUs like the 4040, and a working shift register? It would be amazing!
Brings back so many memories, seeing those colored lines and hearing loading and turboloading sounds. Thanks for this video...
RIP my long lost C64 😢
This was an aaaaeesome collab thank you for all your effords guys! Love and watch you all :D
14:32 That about wraps it up for tape drives.
WRAPS it up for TAPE drives. Wrap tape.
Anyone else remember loading games? Like, playing Space Invaders on a little loading screen while a game loaded, on the C64?
Ah good old tape drives! One technology I certainly do NOT miss. To you younger folks, I can not stress how SLOW these things were. You would literally start one, go make yourself lunch and the program you wanted might have loaded by the time you were done eating. Not to mention, like any other cassette, they were prone to breaking, jamming or just getting too close to a magnet.
Thanks for taking me back! That's my first gaming experience right there - the VIC20 with cassette drive. I think something broke in the tape drive so it picked up sound from the room, so you had to sit there in complete silence, else the game would fail to load. The patience and self control involved with gaming back then!
5:55 "A primitive computer, I've seen them demonstrated before in museums." It's already in a museum lol
"Special breakout cable" ah apple hasn't changed
He was talking about the Tandy
I love crossover episodes like this that feature people from other channels I'm subscribed to! Also the Red Dwarf clip makes me smile from ear to ear like the smeghead I am.
The coolest thing we did with our old COCO2 tape drive was to use it to connect to a radio shack walkie-talkie, that happen to tuned to the same freq and the 4x4 truck sold by radio shack. Then I record the sounds that the remote truck transmitter made. After rewinding the tape, I used the walkie-talkie to play back the sounds it recorded and was basically a programmed course that the 4x4 remote truck would repeat pretty much exactly like the original inputs. It amazed the other kids on my block, nothing like that had been seen up to that point.
You were one patient 6 year old!
I personally do prefer episodes that are done alone, but I do think collaborations can be great if done properly, like the Are Computers Getting Faster video. But I've done the math, and out of the 15 minutes this episode lasts, approximately 8 minutes of it is the 8-Bit Guy. That means that 43% of this video is not the 8-bit guy. No offense to the guest stars here, but I really don't think they added much to this video. I'm a huge fan of your work, David, but this one was a dud. To put it into context, the Are Computers Getting Faster video was only 4/11 minutes guest stars, or 36%, so they don't overstay their welcome, but more than that, I feel like since they were giving their opinions on this vast topic, that worked a lot better, and since opinions are varying from person to person, it was interesting to see different thoughts on the matter. Here, it's mostly just facts. I feel like these could have been cut entirely or shortened for time. Also, in that video it felt more focused, as opposed to this video's editing style; which I can see how it was supposed to be an interesting style, but it comes off as a mess more than anything to me.
I also should probably mention that 43% calculation also entailed all of the movie clips. I probably should have mentioned that. I also think that worked better in the Collectible iBook video, mainly because it was much, much shorter.
That's too bad.. I was really proud of this one. And despite the guest stars, it still took me 2 weeks and about 40 hours of work to put this together. I've seen quite a few negative and quite a few positive comments about this video. So it appears polarizing.
+The 8-Bit Guy I've been watching since your Clamshell eBay days.. I must say you're one of my favorite channels, and I thought this was really well made! I never knew anything about these cassettes' role in gaming.
+The 8-Bit Guy Thanks for reading. Other than this video, most of your content is absolutely flawless, and I can't wait for the Floppy Disk video. I'm glad you're not one of those TH-camrs who lump constructive criticism in with trolls and spammers.
I think the video is one of your best.
Still amazed by parents bought me a Vic-20 and Datasette back in the day. That must have been a huge sacrifice for them.
What a nostalgic trip. I miss my old Commodores and Amigas. I really enjoy when some of my favorite TH-camrs do collaborations like this.
How cool is that you can actually write the game code and then yo can play it!!! :D
Glender Alberto González the fact we have the technology is cool but anyone can type a game on their computer still
We in Poland also used the casette tapes in C64 / 8Bit Atari / ZX Spectrum. Disk drives was expensive and not available to average user, but it was sometimes able to see some Atari / Commodore computers with disk drives, eg. at rich friends home :P.
5,25 Floppy drives were not popular in Poland, but in early 90s when Atari ST and Amiga came to us, the 3,5 floppy disks quickly became very popular.
how did you get a computer in communist Poland
@@Natalie-ez1zc Poland in the 80ties wasn't North Korea. Computers weren't illegal, just damn expensive and often not readily available. You had to pay in dollars or german mark for which you needed to work abroad or get it on the black market. My father used to work in West Germany so I had 8bit Atari before the iron curtain fell. My uncle was in merchant navy so he got my cousins one as well. A friend had a Spectrum from an uncle living in the west. A the time it was probably out of reach for most people but wasn't all that uncommon.
Also the Atari tape drive sucked ass big time. I hated it then and have no nostalgia for this piece of crap. I used to look at the disk drive on offer in electronics store and dream. Never got one.
@@Natalie-ez1zc my family own a first C64 in my town, because my dad work for rail company and travel to NRD or Czechoslovakia.
I remember typing in Killer Comet back in the day. Thanks for another great video David.
I'm from New Zealand, in the 1980's my mother entered my brother & I in a competition which we won a commodore 16 keyboard, one joystick & cassette tape drive. After about a year our father arrived home with the commodore 64, keyboard, two joysticks, tape drive (3-4 games on cassette) & 1 or two games on cartridge to our absolute delight. A little later on he purchased a floppy disc drive with multiple games, some more games on cassette and cartridge. But he also surprised us with the dot matrix printer so we basically ended up with the whole commodore 64 package, by the way my favourite game was 'Who Dares Wins' a war type game.
Not so serious - map of Germany is of course incorrect for the 80s and should be replaced by a "Balance of Power" screenshot with Floppy Drive overlay for W-Germany and something like a punchcard for E-Germany. You should cover some Robotron on your channel just for fun :)
"High Speed Dubbing" always fail to copy :D
My ZX Spectrum loaded 48 kB in round about 5 minutes (1500 baud).
I will always recognize the loading screen sound of that machine.
Ordinary tape decks of reasonable quality did the job just fine.
Some games had crazy fast loaders like Way of the Tiger and those could be cumbersome to load.
I used to use a tape drive with the TI99/4A. We had a lot of cartridges too, but some games came on tape, and the best game of all used both. Tunnels of Doom was designed with the main code on the cartridge, but it would load the specifics of the quest from tape. It also did game saves to tape. (It could also use disk, but we didn't have the disk drive for that computer.)
We used a standard tape deck with a special cable to connect to the computer.
When we got the C64, we only used floppies. I remember that the computer was $299 and the 1541 was $199 when we bought it.
10 print "hello world"
20 go to 10
30 insert
40 end
run
i use to write my games to on the vic lol
Load ""
*types the code in* Time to save! *types SAVE "SOME RANDOM CODE"* lol (edit) *types in LOAD "SOME RANDOM CODE"* Game loaded! Yay! c:
The program would never go to 30 and 40 with that code.
Probably good because 30 will produce a syntax error.
Mac Donalds hahaha You're cute!
SYNTAX ERROR AT LINE 30 (in Basic programing you would use the Input command, not insert)
I really like old technology even though I can't understand 99% of the technical parts (heck, I can't even use TODAY'S technology right and I started to use computers when I was 6 years old). I already knew that casette tapes could be used on computers and I know that this channel is more about the 1980s, but what made me more curious about this video is a 1972 episode of the anime Gatchaman where they saved Earth from a space invasion with... A casette tape. It left a bit of an impact on me because I thought "wow, so they were THIS important back in the day... And we thought that saving the universe with a floppy disk was wild".
Great episode! Brings back lots of memories 🙂
10:42 The 8-bit guy is a robot confirmed.
Where can I buy that audio interface for the C=64 that you show at 8:38 ?
I bought mine on ebay as a kit for $17.. in fact, I'm planning a whole episode on that here soon.
Is there a similar device for the ZX Spectrum?
+Vkcpolice app for the phone?
Seems that particular one is sold on Ebay by the spanish creator, search for "MP32C64".
You don't need one. The ZX Spectrum has a line in. And even if you have a +2A like me you only need a passive adapter. No electronics needed.
I wonder how many vinyl records it would take to play skyrim?
HAHA! Tricked you into doing math for no reason!
+Ryan Y
Was actually interresting for me.
Allot
it depends, if the recorder support dense data recording, you could fit skyrim in 5 tapes
A record can hold around 1.2GB (if I remember correctly) so you can math the hell outta that one. A standard 2hour VHS can hold 2.6GB (Again, If I'm remembering correctly). I think the only thing that would be viable is a long reel to reel tape. But even then, it could hold the data but then would need to be read and loaded into RAM or a temporary spot on a HDD as it couldn't actually play off of a tape or even vinyl, but there are analog methods that could hold it. I actually find storing data on analog mediums pretty interesting so it's cool to think about
10:53 There was even a C-15 (7.5 min/side) marketed by Maxell in the early '80s. Great for small programs, EPs, and answering machines.
When I was a kid, the library of congress’s national library for the blind and physically handicapped. The physically handicap now replaced by “print disabled “.
They offered records, large print or braille, and cassette. The cassettes had to be inserted in a proprietary cassette player and the records as well. The records played a a much slower speed than commercial records. But it had various speed settings. They were announcing and had scratches to the point sometimes they were unplayable. The TBP had magazines you could sub to at no cost. They came on flexible disc and if you were lucky, they didn’t have a bend in them. They didn’t stop using them until the mid 90’s.
The cassettes ran at speeds that were about half the speed of commercial tapes. The audio was divided between the left and right speakers. You had sides one and two, and the book had sides three and four in the other speaker that you played by flipping a rocker switch on the player. If you did that and there wasn’t a Side 3 or 4, you heard the opposite side of the cassette in reverse. In order to play a commercial tape, you flipped a switch to play the tape at normal speed, other wise it sounded so slow that it was impossible to understand the content.
The devices for playback were free and were always run some god awful color (an odd shade of dark green, some weird shade of maroon, and a yellow the color of urine.) the cassette player was ran by stand plug that was attached to player and could be stored in a compartment in the player to store it when it was charged. The nickel cadmium battery was rechargeable and lasted for about 4 hours off the AC current., and was about the size of a scrubber sponge but much thicker.
Nowadays they have a digital player that is a the size of a regular textbook. The books for this come is a proprietary cartridge that contains a usb drive in it. But has a USB port one the side to update the player or allow for the user to connect a thumb drive with music or material that is downloadable from their computer after accessing the electronic library. The books can be downloaded in braille format that can be read on a braille pda, and be read in a braille display or synthesized speech by the pda device. Books that are downloaded in audio format are playable only by the book player and are in daisy format. This allows the reader the ability for navigate the text by sections such as chapter, section or paragraph. When these options are available.
They have an app now that allows patrons to download audiobooks from directly to their phone and are currently working on an app for smart speaker devices like Alexa or Google.
This is long, but thought it might be interesting.