I understand exactly where you're coming from. It's easy enough to make a secondary storage emulator but unless it's electromechanical it's not the same, is it? I still use SCSI tape drives day to day "because". Currently LTO, with autochangers. A RAID would work out a lot cheaper per Mb, but has no charm.
In your position, how about cassette, as you suggested? A Kansas City circuit is easy enough to make. I use the schematics from Ohio Scientific computers (e.g 600 board) as a reference circuit, largely because it's what I used in the 1970s. I also got myself a solenoid controlled tape deck and interfaced it to my computer for Random Access. Disk drives were extremely expensive. Whether this was entirely practical is another matter, but who cares? I got a Sharp deck with APSS(?) which was a feature that would fast forward and rewind looking for silence between tracks, and stop when it found some. With tape decks you really need four to do interesting things. These days that's affordable. Paper tape? I have it but it's less practical - especially as you can't get supplies easily. I started on paper tape and upgraded to cassette. The system software I had at the time assumed paper but the cassette dropped in as a hardware compatible replacement. The only snag was that once started the CPU had to process it at the speed it came, whereas the paper tape was starting/stop. Regards, Frank On 21 June 2025 05:58:16 BST, ben via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: >Now that I have my 18 bit retro computer working, I am thinking of adding >classic IO, like paper tape. Sadly I am a few decades too late. >Is there anything out there to replace a punch/reader used as 70's i/o? >Any good mag tape (cassete tape) replacements? I would love a tiny 9 track mag >tape toy sized if they made one, like the wall hanging PDP8's. >On wish list, a flex writer or TTY video display replacement, ie overstrike >and underline in 2/3 size VT100 case. >Ben. >https://www.instructables.com/23-Scale-VT100-Terminal-Reproduction/
