TAPEDECK ROBOT VOICE PORTABLE

The players and tapes were a convenient and portable alternative to vinyl records, or older reel-to-reel 1/4-inch audio tape. Music of the era was sold on cassettes for automobiles and home and played on 'personal' portable players. The cassettes held 1/8-inch width tapes and were playable for tens of minutes per side. Cassette recorders and tapes were available, inexpensive and popular.

One solution was to use audio tones as recorded on audio cassette tapes, to represent binary data. Even that technology - paper tape readers, punches, Teletypes - were expensive devices, inĬommercial use for data or text communications and on minicomputers and industrial controllers. Programs, therefore, were stored on paper tape, as punched holes Priced at ONLY a few THOUSAND dollars apiece. That came later, when floppy diskette drives and hard drives were When microcomputers became available and affordable in the mid-1970's, they did not include 'mass storage',Īs we think of it in the 21st century. Is particular interest today by 'gamers' in vintage computing. Many of these programs are games, and there Decades later, vintage computer owners and museums of computing technology, are recovering the binary (and audio) content from these decade-old tapes. Into the 1980's personal computers in mass-production continued to use cassettes, because of their cost advantage and simple digital hardware over floppy diskettes and drives. Personal portable cassette recorders were inexpensive, reliable, available the circuits needed on the microcomputers were simple. Several digital standards and circuits and programs were developed in the period. HerbĪudio tape cassettes of the 1960's (developed by Phillips) were used with the first microcomputers of the mid-1970's, to store and recall programs. In May 18 2018, I gave a talk at the VCF-East vintage computing convention on audio cassettes forĭata storage based on the content of this Web page. This document was first produced in 2014, with updated content to Oct 25 2019, (c) 2019 Herb Johnson

Tapedeck robot voice