Michael Black wrote:
On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, heuser.marcus@freenet.de wrote:Of course, that's an actual big step up. Having to find the start of a program on a cassette was as much a problem as the slow loading. I used ten minute cassettes, and kept one important program on each (maybe a backup later on the tape), but I gather most people used 30 minute or longer tapes and multiple programs per cassette, making the search issue worse.On Apr 26, 2:36 am, "Russg" <russg...@MUNGEsbcglobal.net> wrote:.4 kb/s ? That's 400 bytes /sec or about 4000 bits/sec?Yes. As Ensor says it's hideous. It's more like a tape recorder without the need to spool to the sections to load from.
For a couple of years, and lots of software development, I used C60 cassettes, and a recorder with a tape counter. I always reset the counter at the beginning of a tape, and faithfully logged the start of each program saved on a paper "directory". This made it quite natural to save "generations" of a program under development so that the latest version was always at the end of the used tape. I never had any of the problems that others describe in using cassette storage, which I attribute to finding a good volume setting and always using the same cassette deck. I modified the deck so that I could always faintly hear what was being played back or recorded through the speaker, providing good cues for activity and making it easy to confirm the tape positioning. This was all using an Apple ][+ computer, so the tape starts and stops were manual, -michael NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."