Comment by legitster
4 years ago
This reminds me of an old hacky product that would let you use cheap VHS tapes as backup storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
You would hit Record on a VCR and the computer data would be encoded as video data on the tape.
People are clever.
Early games and software would be delivered on audio cassettes that would then have to be 'played' in order to load your software temporarily into the device, which could take minutes
edit: Video from the 8-bit Guy on how this worked - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9SM9lG47Ew
Wow, 2GB on a standard tape. For the time, that's incredibly efficient and cheap.
Yeah. Video, even old grainy VHS, had a pretty high bandwidth. Even much more so with S-VHS, which did not become super popular though. (I'm actually wondering whether the 2GB figure was for S-VHS, not VHS. Didn't to the math and wouldn't be surprised either way, though.)
A normal VHS encodes about 100 million scan lines over 2 hours. 20 bytes per scan line sounds feasible, since there's somewhere around 200-300 'pixels' of luma available in each scan line.
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This is old school. When I first wrote code back in the Stone Age we used to store our stuff on cassette tape.
You had cassette tape?? Lucky... I had to write my 1's and 0's in the dirt with a stick.
Damn rain.
You guys had dirt?
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I still have my Atari 400 and tape drive!
My family had Atari 400 with a tape drive. I remembered buying a tape with a game. We also use it for basic programming language and the Astroids game using a cartridge.
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Ha ha, when I was a kid with my C64, I used my moms old reel-to-reel tape deck to store data.
I still have a C64 and tape drive.
There was a magazine in the 80’s where you could scan in the code with a bar code scanner.
The Alesis ADAT 8 track digital audio recorders used SVHS tapes as the medium - at the end of the day, it's just a spooled magnetic medium, not hugely different conceptually than a hard drive.
That's not really that hacky, audio cassettes were used forever, it's just a tape backup.
Yes! There were many such systems, LGR made a video for one of them, also showing the interface (as in: hardware and GUI) for the backup: https://youtu.be/TUS0Zv2APjU
I remember a similar solution that was marketed in a German mail order catalogue in late 1990s. It could have been Conrad, but I'm not 100% sure. I recall it being a USB peripheral, though. (Maybe I could find more about it in time...)