Re: Cassette port / CD-Rs

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

In article <LQGdnQ-H7MVa58CjXTWcoQ@comcast.com>, "GarberStreet Enterprises"
<willy46pa@comcast.net> writes:

>The only practical usage for this idea would as you
>all agree be slower than molasses on an iceburg,
>is to hook up your right input channel to your VCR,
>record your entire partition from your hard drive onto
>the sound portion of a VHS tape. Put it on a shelf.
>Then if something crashes big time, reload it onto a
>new drive and you're back up and running. I used
> VCR to back up drives on my PC-XT back in the
>day when they had mono ports on the sound cards.
>Other than that I see no real use for it. And what
>about IIgs, how to load it back in is a major issue.

This doesn't "sound" right.

Since the average speed of the Apple II cassette I/O is about
187 bytes/sec, a two-hour recording will hold about 1.34MB
of data--not nearly enough to be interesting.

I'm assuming that with Hi-Fi recording (and how about stereo)
a PC sound card could pump out (and read back) as much as
40kbps per channel, for a stereo total of 80kbps, or 10KB/sec.
At that rate, as much as 72MB could be recorded in two hours.
(Of course, everything should be recorded twice, just to provide
some insurance against tape dropouts.)

There was a much more interesting backup/restore device made
using a VCR, that encoded the data into a (pretty low resolution)
video signal.  I don't recall the data transfer speed, but I expect
it was also in the few tens of KB/sec range.  It used a dedicated
slot card to generate and decode the video data signal.

This device (whose name I don't recall at the moment) was
marketed for the Apple II and, I expect, the IBM PC.

-michael

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