8 Mar
2023
8 Mar
'23
3:07 p.m.
On 3/8/2023 9:11 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
Nope. No data. Somewhere here in the house I still have a cassette. They
were just like audio cassettes but much sturdier. And had slides on the
back
where you breakout the write-protect tabs on audio cassettes. I haven't
seen
a Plato terminal since very early 80's which is when I acquired the one
tape I
have. I seem to remember that if you put it in an audio cassette player
all you
got was noise. No recognizable patterns. But I could be wrong as that
was a long
time ago.
I was hoping someone here had more info on it as I have always been curious.
bill
On Mar 8, 2023, at 7:25 AM, Bill Gunshannon via
cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 3/7/2023 8:30 PM, Dennis Boone via cctalk wrote:
What about the data cassettes used on things like Plato? Not
at all like the
audio cassettes later used on home computers.
I'm not familiar with PLATO
cassettes. Are those attached to terminals? The oldest data cassettes I know of are on
the TI Silent 733 terminals -- which were thought of as paper tape emulation done on audio
cassettes, at 300 bps. But I've never heard of anything like that on PLATO. The
closest similar thing I can think of is floppy disks, which were used as peripherals to
store "micro TUTOR" programs for some later terminals. The current PLATO
emulation at cyber1.org supports this.
Do you have any documents describing the cassettes you mentioned?
I’m
working on a project, and I need to know the age of various tape
formats. For example when were 6250bpi 700’ 9-Track tapes or DC600A
cartridges introduced? Is there any good resource online that
documents this? Wikipedia is of some help, but the older you go, the
spottier it is.
For QIC, qic.org has a some info. For DLT and LTO, the wikipedia pages
are fairly useful.