Re: Cassette Capacity

["Albert D. Kallal" <PleaseNOOOsPAMmkallal@msn.com>]

At the time, blank floppy disks where in the $7-9$ range for ONE floppy. I 
had a floppy drive, but disks were expensive.

So, I grabbed a little relay from Radio Shack, and plugged that relay into 
the cassette recorders' on/off jack (the smaller jack, right beside the 
microphone in jack that most table top cassette recorders had).

I then just simply hit the play + record button, but the "pause" was now 
controlled by the apple...

I then wrote some software to read sectors of the disk into memory (I about 
40k of data), I would then start the tape, and do a bsave...when done, stop 
the tape, and then continue reading in the next 40kb of data. I recall is 
took 4 of these, but since it was automatic, I could pop in a disk, and walk 
away...

I seem to recall that a 45 min tape, each side was good for a whole floppy 
disk, but I was not using the full side of the cassette. Given that one 
could purchase el-cheapo cassettes at discount stores for about 30 cents, it 
was a heck of a lot cheaper to archive un-used floppy disks at $8 a piece...

I never was a hardware guy, but hooking in a simple relay into the game 
(paddle) port, and a bit of software to read the floppy into memory and 
start a bsave was quite easy.  It was so easy to do, and it is this kind of 
ease of accomplishing tasks that gives me such fond memories of my Apple 
II+...

-- 
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
pleaseNOOSpamKallal@msn.com