| I don't know what a cassette tape is | |
| I do know what a cassette tape is | |
| I've listened to music on cassette tape | |
| I've recorded music to cassette tape | |
| I've loaded software from cassette tape | |
| I've written software to cassette tape |
@spacelizard
Yep. Back in the early '80s, a friend gave me a bitty toy computer that I could plug into a regular tape recorder - and a black-and-white TV -and lo! I learned to program...within 1k.
I miss it.
| Do you know how to use a pencil with a cassette | |
| Have you used a pencil with a cassette |
@spacelizard TRS-80 BASIC
turn the volume way down before you play it on a regular cassette player because two tracks of irregular square waves is kind of painful to listen to.
TRS-80 cassette tape players were so much fun. /s Much of the time you'd wait 10 minutes for it to load just for it to fail and you's have to try it again. Eventually the tape would just go bad.
Huh, more people have recorded to cassettes than have listened to them.
Yes, seems improbable.
I feel like I need to say that I have written and loaded software on tapes, but only as a "vintage computing" activity with my trusty TRS 80 which I bring in to scare my students from time to time "this is what laptops used to be like" they love it and are fascinated... or terrified, hard to say their eyes are very big the whole time.
But it's not really of my time. I did grow up listening to rock and roll on cassette tapes however, in Ohio no less behind a 7/11
The little screen had menu options on it with numbers and one of them tried to press the screen... to be fair touch screens did exist when this was made... but they looked like they were covered in horrible plastic wrap.
@spacelizard I *still have* some software that I wrote on cassette tape. And the machine it was written on.
Although it may not be readable by now, and, I don't think I have the hardware required to play the tape.
I feel old....-_-"""
@spacelizard Not only have I written and read software to and from cassette tape, I wrote a utility to use cassette tape as a transfer medium between operating systems!
https://archive.org/details/Dragon_User_1988-03_Sunshine_Books_GB/page/n11/mode/2up
I'm more surprised by the 3% who have recorded music to a tape but never listened to music on a tape.
@spacelizard Well, young'uns, I had a Commodore 64 as a kid (borrowed, actually), back when we had our games, applications & files (such as they were) on cassette tapes...
As far as I remember I didn't even have the proper, branded one, just a regular cassette deck 😂
Somehow I feel like "I have used the 8 mm cassette tape drive the telescope operators kept to run archival software from the '80s" does not meet the spirit of this poll.
Interesting results, more people have used a cassette tape than know what one is.
Likely not realizing it was a multiple, not single choice poll.
@spacelizard
I remember a time when a cassette tape was the only way I could save my software!
I've also used 9-track reel tape for data, which was a bit archaic even then.
And cassettes were the only real option for DIY music and mixtapes.
@spacelizard I think I did once try to write software to a cassette tape. But I don’t think I have ever successfully written software to a cassette tape.
Flash is pretty fucking cool.
I mostly listen to music these days on cassette tape. I create mixes with audio files and record them to tapes
I mean technically, I might be doing 35 and 52, because our data is on tape back-up, but I guess that's not a cassette tape.
I have to say I've never heard of software on a cassette tape, seems like it would be waaaay slower than floppy, since you have to fast forward through all of the stuff you don't need.
For ppl who used them, did you put more frequently accessed info at the beginning of the tape?
@MCDuncanLab Yes, by cassette tape I mean Compact Cassette, the standard analogue audio tape that peaked in popularity in the 1980s. Later digital tape formats are a whole other thing.
Yes, cassette tape as a software/data storage medium was slow, inconveniently sequential and frequently unreliable. No one would choose to use it over floppy discs if they had that option, but there was a period during the 8 bit computer era when a lot of people didn't have that choice. For a number of these early home computers disc drives either didn't exist or were prohibitively expensive, in some cases costing more than the computer they attached to. In the UK and a number of other countries the majority of software sales were on cassette throughout the entire 80's.
As a kid growing up during this time I was very lucky that while we started with cassette tapes for our Sinclair ZX-81 and BBC Micro we later upgraded to using a dual 5¼" floppy disc drive, a pretty extravagant bit of home computer equipment at the time.
The only tape I've used with software is on large reels.
I went through two generations of reel-to-reel tape for music before graduating to cassette.
But then I'm in my fourth and presumably final quarter century.
I never used 8-track.
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