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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : 26GB cassette tape storage in 1996...
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9486 |
Interesting video about the history of tape archival storage... Tape storage... EDIT: 24GB, not 26GB, but still..... Edited 2025-03-22 11:37 by Grogster Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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PeteCotton Guru  Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 527 |
Very interesting. It reminds me of the old HP 9000 computers. They had a tape cartridge system was Random Access. It blew my mind at the time. It wasn't particularly fast to load, but it would find any program in the tape in a matter of seconds - and no worries about overwriting other files (or setting volume levels like with a Spectrum). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuMBOiwPnOg&t=1s |
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Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7504 |
hehe. Shameless plug time. The Hobbit tape drive Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| PeteCotton Guru Joined: 13/08/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 527 |
I'd never heard of this. It does show that tapes were a viable alternative to disks - but I suspect they had such a bad rap from the early 8-bit home computer days (I remember tweaking the volume control on my boombox* to load games into my Dragon 32) that most people dismissed them. * Said boombox had the unusual feature of not cutting out the main speakers when playing through the headphone jack - and therefore requiring me to hold a pillow over it while trying to load a game to deaden the sound. |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 7504 |
I saw a pair of Hpbbit drives running and they were pretty impressive for the time. Obviously seek times weren't much to get excited about, but data transfer was perfectly adequate for most people at the time. I have a drive here (one of the pair got smashed :( ) but I've no software to run it with. Actually, I've no working Nascom to connect it to either at the moment. The one that worked ok last time will need all it's caps checking before I'd consider powering it up now. The proper tapes for it were data rated and not particularly cheap. The dictating machine cassettes will fit mechanically but are liable to stretch and have a pretty short lifetime. Most are too long too, which increases search times even more. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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