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:
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.
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
supports this.
Do you have any documents describing the cassettes you mentioned?
paul