Re: Cassette Capacity

[Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca>]

On Tue, 1 Dec 2009, Andy McFadden wrote:

> Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@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.
But you can probably get those cassettes for free, or close to it.  After 
all, nobody much uses cassettes anymore, and they want to get rid of
what they have.

A few years ago, I came upon a bunch of boxes of cassettes, not bottom of
the line either, waiting for the garbage.  They'd been used, but looked
in good shape.  I only took one box of ten, I couldn't figure out what
I might need them for (since I already have a stock of cassettes, and
would have more if I ever got around to copying the ones I recorded
on to digital.

The reality is, I never tried to cram computer programs onto cassette
tapes (and I didn't get a floppy drive till 1984, and my first hard
drive till 1993).  It was too much bother to find a specific program
some programs into the tape.  So I tended to use a tape for development,
keeping subsequent saves for subsequent versions, and then move the
finished work to some other tape.  For the most common programs, I
used those ten minute cassettes, Radio Shack sold them back then so
you didn't need to make your own, and would put one or two programs
on them.  Yes, a waste, but the audio cassette version of a "module"
that came later.


   Michael