9 May
2016
9 May
'16
11:12 p.m.
On 5/9/2016 10:23 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 05/09/2016 01:33 PM, Sean Caron wrote:
I have a couple of Columbia Data Products boxes which recorded to DC-300
type QIC tapes. They could both record and play back at up to 38k,
IIRC. This is the same outfit that also made an early IBM PC compatible
system. The really nifty thing about the BIOS on the CDP was that it
had a binary debugger integrated into the BIOS so you could enable and
use a keyboard break to stop the machine in its tracks running
anywhere. But I digress.
The thing that struck me about the above units was that it mentions that
the tapes recorded were compatible with the TI printing terminals. IIRc
there was a Silent 700 that had cassettes? Or was it the KSR version of
the 800 dot matrix TI printers?
Nifty units
thanks
Jim
I found some interesting information about it in
the Appendices of
this technical report:
http://misclab.umeoce.maine.edu/education/VisibilityLab/reports/SIO_82-27.p…
Apparently the product was used in several documented data
acquisition applications over the course of the early '80s.
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