i have a weird fascination with cheapo no-name brands of cassette tapes such as magnasonic k-tape
tonemaster and irish series 2000.
so when i saw this brand it really caught my interest computron originally sold in a
bag of three unfortunately there's only two left the original price was $2.29
made in hong kong number 1390 these are 90 minute cassettes they claim to be high output low noise
and they did not include cases or cards just the cassettes
with a name like computron in this wonderful early 1980s digital style font
it instantly makes you think of two things one is obviously computers
"it's the 1980s it's the 1980s and guess what guess what computers
computers mainframes SCSI boards DOS"
and the next is the movie tron which due to copyright reasons i can't show
you any clips of but i can show you a couple of computer games that were inspired by it such as
novatron for the ibm pc and beam rider by activision
and i looked it up and the trademark for computron was filed in september 1982 while the movie tron
came out in july 1982. so gee i wonder where they got their inspiration from and with the name
computron it's obvious to think that these tapes were designed for the use of computers after all
it was the early 1980s and cassette tapes were one of the main formats that people used to save
computer data on and there were a lot of dedicated computer cassettes available at that time
but they're normally in much shorter lengths like 10 or 20 minutes while these are 90 minutes
and aside from the name computron there's nothing to indicate that these were designed for use of
computers so i did a little more digging and it turns out that computron was a trademark
of the aero trading company and they used it on products such as telephones and radios and
eight track players and cassette players but not on any computer equipment that i can find
so were these cassettes designed for humans or computers or the combination of both gary numan
taking a look at the cassette itself is very light and rather rattley and the tape itself is
a dark brown with a matte finish not the highest quality i've ever seen but far from the worst
for my first test i typed a small basic program into my tandy color computer 3
and then i'm going to try saving it onto this computron cassette
and then loading it back into the computer and see if that works
here's the program i typed in
now i'm going to put in the computron cassette now i'll type csave to save the program to cassette
and that's done now i will rewind it to before the beginning of the program
and that was it then i'll turn the computer off and then back on again to make sure the program
is completely cleared out of memory so now i'll type cload and press play on the cassette recorder
and that's it it loaded the program from cassette and there it is let's see if it runs
and it does so the computron cassette worked for saving and loading a computer program to cassette
so the computron cassette is fit for computers but is it fit for humans
for that test i'll switch from using a cassette recorder design for computers
to the same basic model except design for recording the human voice here we go
recording the human voice on the computron cassette just stick it in and hit record
this is my first test recording my voice on the computron cassette from 1982.
that was a rather noisy rewind and here's the playback
this is my first test recording my voice on the computron cassette from 1982 the year of hall
and oates depeche mode and the vhs versus beta format war let's see how good this cassette sounds
recording my voice through the built-in microphone of this realistic ctr-75 cassette tape recorder
now here's a test of using an external microphone with the computron cassette
and the realistic tape recorder so we can get a better recording without all that motor noise
using a radio shack external microphone and let's see how this sounds
so far so good but the ultimate test will be recording music on this cassette
for the music recording test i don't want to use something really high-end because
a really good cassette recorder can make even the cheapest tape
sound okay but obviously i don't want to use something very poor quality either
so i'm going to use my new teac w1200 deck which i think is a good mid point between
those two extremes it cannot record with dolby noise reduction but let's be honest
anybody buying this kind of cassette tape in 1982 wouldn't have owned a deck with dolby anyway
so put it in and i'll set my levels rather conservatively
peaking at 0 db but not any higher than that and i'm ready to make my recording
and logically enough for a tape named computron the track i'm using is slugbug's computers again
well that's pretty much what i expected it obviously didn't sound great but it didn't sound
that terrible either it lost a lot of level and high end compared to what i was putting onto it
but considering that it's almost 40 years old it had relatively few dropouts
overall for what was a very cheap tape back in 1982 i think it did an okay job
so that's the computron cassette tape from 1982
better for computers than humans but usable by both