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Re: Cassette Capacity
On Mon, 30 Nov 2009, winston19842005@yahoo.com wrote:
On Dec 1, 1:22 am, Andy McFadden <fad...@fadden.com> wrote:
Michael J. Mahon <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:
With 1.5TB SATA drives now regularly on sale for less than $90, it's
hard to justify any other medium.
I don't know. At 1500bps, you can back up a gigabyte to cassette tape
in a little over two months. And at roughly 500KB per 60-minute cassette,
you'd only need a couple thousand of them.
Hmm. Now me wonders about the "wafertape" systems, like the stringy-
floppy thingy the TRS-80 people used, or the Coleco Adam's tape
systems...? I have an Adam, and the tape drive is actually quite
wonderful. Never did experience the "erase tape on power-on" problem
reported, and I didn't know better for about 6 months of using it...
The thing about those wasn't just the medium, but they were treated
as a "cheap floppy drive". So there was a real operating system
involved, and the computer did the work to find the required program
and load it, albeit slower than a floppy drive. Cassettes, you generally
did have to keep track on paper of the sequence of the programs on
the tape, and even the counter reading when each started. The Stringy
Floppy or wafertapes, unlike the cheap cassette recorders commonly used
with computers back then, had some advanced drive that was intended
for computer control, so it was much easier to control from the
computer. Even the Commodore PET, that had a built in
cassette recorder, that was a standard recorder built into the computer,
not some fancy drive.
On the other hand, there was in the early days one floppy disk system
that did away with the operating system. It was a hybrid of cassette
and floppy, in that you'd simply write the program to the floppy, and
then write down where it started and ended.
Michael