I have no specific info about THAT article. About TWENTY years ago, Corvus had a VHS backup for Aplle][

The Salvation Army, when they still used Alpha Micro systems (they may still be using them), had such a backup system (I helped with a few tasks at some of the local corps). -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- NEWS ITEM: Energizer Bunny arrested, charged with battery ------------------

Back about 1983/1984 I was evaluating a computer called the "Alpha microcomputer" for a university department (not to be confused with the DEC Alpha AXP line about six years later") Anyhow, the alpha micro had a tape backup unit that you could use the same tapes that you used in your VCR although back then it probably wasn't VHS-format, it was probably Beta (Hey there's a joke in there somewhere... "use a Beta tape on your Alpha micro") Thomas Dzubin On Sat, 15 Feb 2003, Tomer Gabel wrote:

that 10 searches on I don't have any reference to what you're looking for, but do have a story about such technology. Alpha Micro had a board that would go into their early systems that would do just that. There was an AMOS application that would do automatic unattended backups to standard VHS tapes. A company that my wife worked for years ago used Alpha Micro (I believe they were S100 bus machines with a Western Digital microprocessor that was PDP11-like -- I think it the system was called an AM-100?) system for a custom-written system (in Alpha Micro's powerful BASIC compiler environment) that managed all aspects of patient records management and billing for institutional pharmacies (nursing homes, hospitals, etc.). Timeframe was probably the early 1980's, if I remember correctly. The system, as I recall, had a big S100 chassis stuffed with boards, including multi-port serial boards, lots of memory, an SMD disk intefrace (that hooked up to multiple CDC Hawk 14" drives (later upgraded to Fujitsu Eagle), and a special card that fed video out to the VHS VCR for tape backup. The VHS backup system worked pretty well, but they eventually had more data than could be held on one tape, so they ended up going with another type of backup technology. As a result, they had a ton of used VHS tapes that they just put out in the employee lunchroom for people to take. My wife brought home a few thinking that we could just use them as 'scratch' tape sto record TV onto. I was curious, so I stuck one of them in my VCR and pushed "PLAY". The resulting display on the TV was quite interesting. Apparently the 'backup' part of the nterface card was nothing much more than a small video system, with a frame buffer memory and video interface circuitry. The video was just a pattern of bits that showed up as black and white rectangles (not at tremendously high resolution) on the screen, with a series of static patterns on the first few rows (framing data?) followed by a bunch of random bits (payload), followed by more (different) static bits that probably served as an 'end of frame' indicator. The 'restore' aspect of the board was probably fairly simple circuitry to pick out the framing and payload data from the video stream, and ship it back to the application in byte-sized chunks. Interesting technology. Seems to me that with today's fancy video boards that have video digitizers built into them, it wouldn't be too tough to reproduce this technology using such a video card. Rick Bensene The Old Calculator Web Museum http://www.geocities.com/oldcalculators

On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Bill Richman wrote: If anyone has the software and/or documentation for an Alpha Micro ISA bus backup card, I would like to get my hands on it. Steve

Sony sold "MD-Data" drives. Sony claimed that it would replace floppy discs. (Amazing how many things were predicted to do that yet didn't.) The drives were very pricey, which of course prevented widespread adoption. I can only imagine that some brilliant person in Sony's marketing department must have been thinking "we can push these as a floppy drive replacement, sell them to OEMs to be put in every PC, and make $150 on each unit". Anyhow, you were probably asking about trying to record data on an audio MD recorder, perhaps by using the optical digital input. Although it's sort of possible, the problem is the lossy audio compression. You'd have to come up with a way to encode the data such that it has audio characteristics that will pass through the encoder. Of course, the exact operation of the coder (ATRAC?) is a trade secret of Sony, so this will be difficult. By the time all's said and done, I doubt that you could get more than about 20 MB on the disc in this manner, and it would take over an hour to record that.

They said that either in a press release or an interview, I don't recall.