On 3/8/2023 9:11 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
On Mar 8, 2023, at 7:25 AM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk@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 cyber1.org supports this.
Do you have any documents describing the cassettes you mentioned?
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
