Memodyne M80 Digital Cassette Recorder

On 05/09/2016 01:33 PM, Sean Caron wrote: If you were around in, say, 1975, this box would be no mystery at all. "Glass TTYs" were getting cheaper than the mechanical sort and used less paper. The problem was what to do about the paper tape thing. That's where these boxes came in. You hooked them inline between your terminal and its host (could be a modem, or a computer or a leased line) and instead of paper tape, you could use Philips audio cassettes, which held quite a bit. I used a two-deck Techtran model that could go to 9600 bps. One deck was read/write, the other was read-only. You could, via control codes, perform copying and editing between the two decks--you could even search for a (short) string. The mechanism was two-track (clock+data). You could purchase data casettes that were better suited to saturation recording than the audio sort. CNC gear up through the 1980s often had cassette decks or paper tape readers, as did large embroidery machines. Eventually, these were replaced by boxes with floppy drives, which today, are still around, but with floppy emulators in place of floppy drives. That the Memodyne was intended to be hooked between a terminal and a host is witnessed by the two connectors--one DB25F and one DB25M on the back panel. Really, it's just that simple. --Chuck