Comment by ogurechny
4 years ago
130 MB for the whole tape is not a lot. It equals to a floppy disk throughput, which is probably not a coincidence. However, basic soldering implies that the rest of the system acts like a big software-defined DAC/ADC.
Dedicated controller could pack a lot more data, as in hobo tape storage system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
Dedicated controllers were absolutely out of the question because nobody could afford them, which is why Amigas were so popular: a fully multitasking, multimedia computer for 450 DM. That's 225 EUR! Somebody that cost sensitive won't even consider a dedicated controller; back then wasn't like it's today.
This was at a time when 3.5" floppy disks were expensive (and hard to come by), and hard drives were between 40 - 60 MB, so 130 MB was quite practical. The floppy drive in the Amiga read and wrote at 11 KB / s.
And yes, this was a DAC and an ADC in software, with added Reed-Solomon error correction encoding and CRC32. The goal was to be economical. The end price was everything; it had to be as cheap as possible.