Greetings and welcome to an episode of LGR Oddware! Where we're taking a look at
hardware and software that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete! And today it is
this thing right here: the Datasonix Pereos cassette tape storage device
from 1994. You could get around a gigabyte of storage on a teeny
tiny little cassette tape that is a smaller than anything else that was ever
made on the consumer market. Yeah how does this work? Well let's dive right
into it! So this is the Datasonix Pereos, introduced at the end of 1994
for a suggested price of $795 US dollars. It is a data backup system that connects
via the parallel port and weighs just 10 ounces fully loaded, or around 280 grams.
And it fit in the palm of your hand and ran on just two AA batteries. So a
very tiny thing and that was a big selling point, but the most important one
was that is stored up to 1.25 gigabytes of data on tapes the size of a
postage stamp, being the equivalent of over 850 floppy disks. And this was at a
time when a 300 megabyte hard drive would still be considered quite large.
Even the Iomega ZIP drive introduced around the same time only held 100 megs
per disk and was much larger, and required an AC adapter to be plugged in.
So how did it pull it off? Well it all starts with these rebadged Sony NT
tapes, the smallest cassette tapes ever made. With these from Datasonix
costing $34.95 each on introduction. But yeah they really are just Sony NT tapes. They
were digital micro tapes that were originally launched in 1992 for use in
Sony field recording and dictation devices like the NT-1 and NT-2.
Sometimes marketed as the Sony Scoopman, they recorded digitally instead of the
analog method used on the more common Compact Cassette and Microcassette
recorders. And the resulting audio quality was notably high as demonstrated
in a short YouTube video by Techmoan some years back. A video that I do
recommend, so check it out! But yeah the NT was subsequently adapted for
data storage use in the early 90s by Datasonix, the company co-founded by
Juan Rodriguez: the serial entrepreneur and pioneer in development of computer
data storage products in and around Boulder, Colorado. And man this guy is
fascinating but the gist of his technical career is that he started at
IBM in 1963 where he left to co-found the Storage Technology Corporation,
aka StorageTek, in and around Louisville, Colorado in 1969. They became a Fortune
500 company by making tape and disk drives for various business computer
systems throughout the 1970's and early '80s. Rodriguez then founded Exabyte
alongside ex-StorageTek engineers in 1985, innovating in the area of higher
speed more reliable tape backup systems using helical scan technology. Their
breakout product was the EXB-8200 which they claimed was the world's first eight
millimeter helical scan computer storage subsystem. Then he was approached in 1992
about a new tape backup system in development using Sony's NT format. And
it was promising enough that he helped co-found the Datasonix corporation to
sell it under the name Pereos. Perry-ohs? Per-AY-ohs? I'm going with Pereos. And
why do they choose that name? Well, I can't find the original intent but I did
find that in Esperanto "pereos" is the future tense of "pereo," which means that
it translates to "impending doom" or "will perish." A great name for an ambitious new
product if I've ever heard one. Anyway the Pereos storage system was
achieved by building on the NT's non-tracking system, which "NT" stands
for, by the way. This meant instead of tracing each tape track individually the
rotary head inside could read multiple tracks at once. So it divided your data
into blocks of information all across the tracks of the tape in order to
achieve higher capacity and read/write speeds. To quote Mr. Rodriguez on the topic:
*Mat from YouTube channel 'Techmoan' reads the on-screen quotations*
Hmm funny how Juan Rodriguez sounds just
like Mat from Techmoan, what a coincidence...
Anyway the challenges Datasonix faced were immediately apparent, even with some
positive buzz in the press. It quickly dropped in price over the next two years
hitting $499 by 1995 and even after updating the software for Windows 95 it
was not long for this world. The product was dead by 1996 and the company along
with it, having produced only around 12,000 units. This was due to a variety
of factors and one of the biggest ones was that costs were just too high from
the very beginning, both at the end user level and manufacturing. Sony charged
them more than they had initially promised for the drives and tapes then
the final nail in the coffin was the value of the yen dropping from 110 down
to 79 per US dollar. And yeah it was just over for Datasonix. Mr. Rodriguez went
on to found Ecrix and improved the same package storage technology to develop
the VXB tape backup system, now owned by Overland Storage's Tandberg Data. And
along with some consultation work Rodriguez is currently an adjunct
professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. But yeah enough backstory let's open
the box and try this thing out! It took me quite some time to find one of these
things and so far it's the only complete example I've seen show up on eBay.
Well almost complete as it didn't come with the manual or the original disks.
But like I said it's the only one I found so I'll take it! It did come with a backup
CD-R of the software as well as an original Datasonix NT tape. And yes
you can just use regular Sony NT tapes as well. There's also an external power
supply in here if you don't want to use batteries. And the adapter that connects
to the base unit to provide the parallel cable connector and the compartment for
your two AA batteries. And finally there's the Pereos drive itself, tucked
away in this neat little box. And this is a very basic but rather pleasing design
if I do say so myself. It's about the size of an action camera
like a GoPro Hero or something, or maybe a small bar of soap. Feels good in
the hands and only has the one button on it, which is for ejecting the tape slot.
And like the Sony NT recorders it has this dual action mechanism going on
where one press opens the slot and the next one presents you the tray.
*satisfying tray-opening noises commence*
Now that is just satisfying. But yeah you get your tape installed in there and then plugged
into the adapter to get the parallel port and battery situation going on. And
then you plug this into your computer of choice, and this is Windows 3.1
compatible. So yeah it's plugged in let's get the software installed and get to
backing up some stuff on the world's smallest cassette tape! Right so I've got
an HP Vectra VL5 Pentium 133 system from the mid-90s that I found was pretty
appropriate for the era that this thing was in its prime. And the installation
was very straightforward, nothing really special there, you just install it. And
then it detected that the Pereos was plugged in and the parallel port was
configured correctly, and it seems to be. Let's go ahead and back some stuff up!
And yes this is the Datasonix Pereos software version 6.20. Yeah it is from
1997, this was distributed by J&J Peripherals in Colorado a little bit
after Datasonix went under. They sold this thing at a discount through the end of
the 90s or maybe even the very early 2000s from what I can tell from their
website archives. And yeah it's the Windows 95 version of the software. There was a
Windows 3.1 like I mentioned earlier but that's not what mine came with. So we're
just gonna go ahead and use this. The configuration is pretty simple, you can
do some stuff like setting up a password and select your different users, so you
can just have certain users doing certain things as far as backing up of only
certain stuff, if you want to protect things. You can clean the drive, erase the
tape and the label, repair it, and stats and all sorts of stuff. What does this drive
status do... alright cool, so yeah it tells me that I have it plugged in via AC
power, which I do. I don't have any batteries in there right now. Attached to
LPT1 and it is, uh yeah cool. Recommends that you clean
it every 12 hours. And yeah there were a few different things that it wanted me
to check out here and this is what I did: the "select optimal settings." And it did some
tests and this is what it came up with for as quick as I can because I have a
ECP/EPP enabled. Yeah let's go ahead and start saving some files!
Alright so here are the contents of my hard disk drive, it's only a couple gigs
this entire drive. Yeah let's just do something small here at first. I'm just
gonna back up the "Media" folder and that's it. Session name, okay yeah let's
just call this the "LGR Session 1." And here we go looks like it is going to try
and save some stuff on this blank tape that I have hmm.
How exciting! Oh my. It's making noises. I don't know how well you can hear that
let me get a little bit closer with my phone camera.
*tape drive noises do their thing*
Yeah it seems to be doing its thing.
That is awesome, it's at least making noise and spinning around and
numbers are happening so that's a good sign.
Alright it says it wrote everything to the tape, didn't have to do any
repositioning or rewrite counts. Compression is 1.17 to 1. Yeah,
it is automatically compressing those files just a little bit, although there's
not a whole lot to compress in this case. But yeah alright cool.
Well let's see if we can recover them! Man this is exciting. It sounds like I'm
being sarcastic but no seriously, this is exciting. I love using weird backup
systems, especially from tape. There's just something special about it. So it
shows my session here that we just had. Yeah here's the files available from
tape, that's everything! Uh, there it is! Now what I want to actually do here is
backup an entire game, like, several hundred megabytes. So it's probably gonna
take a little while. But I want to do it and just see if it gets everything
correctly -- oh crap I don't want to do that, no, don't -- I accidentally told it to
backup the entire hard drive. I mean, that'd be quite the test as well.
Uhh.
Sure why the hell not I mean, it's only 800 and something megabytes. Just
gonna call this "Vectra HDD," no password. Actually no I do
want a password. No I don't want a password. And yeah let's just reinitialize it, so
it's just gonna wipe out everything here and give the volume a new name. We're gonna
call that "LGR Backup." And here we go, so yeah this is the erase and labeling
tape setup process here, which it had me do when I was setting up the drive for
the first time. All right well that took a good couple minutes, a little longer
than it did to just wipe the initially blank tape. Which I guess that makes
sense because I had written some things on there. But now it's you know, doing the
backup process. All right there goes: 7,246 files,
around eight hundred and seventy three megabytes, yeah. Well I fully
anticipate this is gonna take a while so I'm gonna go ahead and cut off the
camera and then come back as soon as it's complete! So this is interesting, it
reached 95% of the 830 megabytes or so and it's saying that
both sides of the one tape are full. Oh well I do have another tape here, so I'm
gonna go ahead and let it keep going. Alright well that took just shy of three
hours, about two hours and 50 minutes. Had several repositioning cycles and a bunch
of the rewriting attempts, however it does seem to have gotten everything
saved. Although again it didn't actually do it all on one tape, I had to split it
up amongst one and a half. Yeah this was the exact amount that we tried to back
up here, 880 megabytes. Let's see if we can recover some of them now, so we go
back to introduce volume here and it's the same process all over again. I will
just let you know after this if it was able to fully recover a good chunk of my
files or not, be right back. Alright so it took almost exactly one hour to recover
that 168 megabyte game. I chose "POD." Let me go ahead and see if it did it
successfully. Nice! Well it runs like crap because this pretty much just running
software directly on a crappy like, 1 megabyte video chipset. So it runs like
garbage but it does run. That means it recovered everything that it needed to
to get the game loaded from the hard drive so that
is pretty friggin great. Gotta say it is mighty slow... but it does the job.
But I guess that's a trade-off that you make for not only using the parallel
port but also just being such a ridiculously portable audio format
that's been reconfigured for data storage. Still it works without a hitch,
that's something! Well that's about it for this episode of Oddware on the
rather fascinating Datasonix Pereos cassette tape backup system. I'm just
super amused that the Sony NT format was reused/repurposed for data storage.
I mean you know why not, right? There are plenty of tape-based storage
backup systems and of the others that I've used, especially those from Colorado
and Quantum and whatnot, this is the most interesting by far. Just due to the fact
that it uses this teeny tiny little postage stamp-sized things But at the
same time I also see why it didn't exactly succeed in any sense of the word.
It was just so expensive and you really didn't need to move around that much
storage very often. And if you did you're probably gonna go with one of the more
established tape backup systems, and so people did. But you know I'm glad
to have one of the 12,000 here, and I hope that you enjoyed taking a look
at it with me! And if you did then awesome, thank you very much. And perhaps
you'd like to stick around and see more of my videos: Oddware and hardware and
software and all sorts of stuff in-between every Monday and Friday. Also,
special thank you to Mat from Techmoan for supplying his voice! Seriously his
channel is awesome and if you haven't checked it out I highly recommend it. And
as always thank you very much for watching!