Back in 1981, at the age of six, I got my first computer, a Commodore VIC-20. The Commodore
VIC-20. Unlike games, it has a real computer keyboard. And for storage devices, I had...
well, nothing. I had essentially two ways to get information into the computer. One
was by plugging in a cartridge game. These were fun, of course. But kind of expensive
and I didn't have many. The other way was by typing in games from the back of books
or computer magazines. Yes, that was a thing we actually did back then. So you can see
these ridiculously long program listings. Combine that with my six-year-old typing skills
and I was usually looking at several hours to type one of these things into a computer.
And when trying to start the game for the first time, it usually didn't work. That's
because somewhere along the line I made a typo. Which then meant scanning line by line
and trying to find the mistake, which could easily take another hour to find. And eventually.....
the game would work. After spending all of that time typing it in, I would play the game
for 15 minutes and then be bored of it. But there was a problem. What if I wanted to play
the game again? If I turned off the computer, there was no way to get the game back without
typing it in all over again. So often that meant leaving the computer on stuck playing
this game for days on end until I was sure I didn't want to play it anymore. But then
my parents bought me something fantastic. A Commodore datasette. Now when I got my Commodore
VIC-20, it came with a C2N Datasette, or a tape-drive. Now back in those days, a disk
drive was a very expensive acquisition. It probably cost more than the computer itself,
in fact I want to say that it cost around $400 Australian to pick up a 1541 disk drive
as part of the computer package. So the great thing about the datasette was that if I typed
in this long program, I could record it to a tape. Of course, you’ll need to make sure
you wind the tape past this non-magnetic header. And then make a note of the tape-counter so
I would know where to find that program again in the future. Now surely everyone who owned
a tape drive must have been curious enough to stick the tape into a regular tape player
to hear what it sounded like, and here it is. Beautiful music to my ears. Also many
games and programs were available to be purchased on tape from the store. This is actually one
of the first original game compilations that I can ever remember. And, as you can see,
it comes on two cassettes. Each game fits on one side of these cassettes, so as you
can see, hopefully that will focus. You’ve got Beachhead on side 1 and basically if you
flip the side over you have Daley Thompson’s Decathlon on the other side. And that’s
something that was very, very common to have multiple games on compilations that had one
game per side. OK, so what do I think about them? Well, Audio cassette tapes, as being
used for microcomputer storage, retrieval and whatnot for data is something I really
never used until adulthood, and of course it was on purpose because I was wanting to
go back to play with some of these computers that I never got a chance to as a kid. I myself
have never owned a computer that needed a cassette tape drive. I had a number of Apple
II’s but I just used disk drives with those, obviously. But, when I was in the 6th grade,
we had a complete Apple IIe setup, and for some reason we had a cassette tape drive hooked
up to it, and I really don’t know why because we had all kinds of stuff on disk. Many of
the Commodore magazines of the day, for example, Commodore User, Commodore Format, and ZAP64
used to incorporate cassettes on the front of the magazine as a bonus that contained
either demos or full retail games to kind of sweeten the deal to buy the magazine. The
tape drive was inexpensive and it worked, but it wasn’t perfect. For one thing, it
was slow. Now with the Commodore VIC-20. It only had 5K of memory, the programs were all
very small. So loading time was usually less than a minute. But once computers like the
Commodore 64 came out, with 64K of memory, programs could be much larger. Loading times
could be substantial, as much as 15 minutes to load a game. The other problem, of course,
was lack of random access. The computer couldn't go search for a specific file, it could only
load one file at a time, and it was the job of the user to locate the file for the computer.
More complicated software that required reading and writing data on the fly, would simply
not be possible with tape.Now some of the business level tape drives such as these reel-to-reel
units could actually access data randomly and quickly, but were very expensive, and
obviously enormous in size. Of course, robots might like that. And, you’ll find these
reel to reel units in a lot of old movies and TV shows. Isn’t that Spanish for brain?
Yeah. OK, so the electrodes. I know one when I see one. Primitive computer. I’ve seen
them demonstrated in museums. Me too, and if this one’s like those, it’s make the
devil’s old noise if you start it. I don’t intend to start it. This technology is ancient.
Shall we play a game? It’s from a movie that my grandpa I know, I saw it. There it
is, Black Betty. That mainframe is tied to every computer system in this company. And
only Wally knows its secrets. And apparently tapes will be used in the future to store
brains. So, on a more serious note, there were two styles of interface for tape drives:
Analog or Digital. The analog interface is pretty straight forward. You just take any
standard tape recorder made at that time, and you plug the input and output into the
computer. Apple used this interface, along with the Tandy laptops and the color computer,
although they required a special breakout cable. Even this old Yamaha keyboard can load
and save programs to tape using an analog connection. And so the thing with most tape
recorders is that because they are really meant for audio, they had this little knob
on them called a tone knob. And if you ever used a cassette tape drive back in the day,
unless you had a Commodore, this tone knob kind of became the bane of your existence.
I love the fact that you can also just mess with this in ways that obviously was never
intended, so if you get certain programs you can convert over old programs into something
that maybe was on disk and put it on tape, and then stick it on an MP3 player or cell
phone or something as long as you have the cables and volume set correctly, you can just
get it to work. So what Clint is talking about here is the computers only listening for sound,
they didn’t really care where the sound came from. It could have been, you know, a
tape, or a vinyl record, or could have come over the air, they just really didn’t care.
The upshot of that today is that computers with cassette interfaces are super easy to
get software from the internet. All you need is a simple audio cable like this. You can
open a website on your cell phone and find a game you want, then play the audio file.
And of course, you’ll hear this sound. But if you plug that into the computer it will
think this is loading from tape, and in just a few seconds you’ll have loaded up your
game. On the other hand, Commodore used a digitial interface on all of their computers
and this system was supposedly more reliable. It was, at minimum, simpler to connect and
use since it didn’t require adjusting any audio levels. Atari used a similar system
with their tape drives. Since Commodore machines don’t have an analog input, you would think
they would not be able to take advantage of this. But, for just a few bucks you can buy
an analog to digital to analog tape adapter that will allow you to have the same functionality.
There’s also the fact that I heard in Europe there were some flexi-discs. They were like
records, almost like vinyl but in a flexi kind of format, really cheaply done, and some
games were actually distributed on that using the same audio interface as well. You could
put that on your record player and hook it into your audio in on your computer and get
it that way. And also, sending the signals over the air, with radio. A similar principle
can be used to transfer software from your computer directly to a cassette recorder like
this, and now you’ve made a cassette that you can play in your original tape drive.
So, the other thing that I remember from loading games from cassette and cassette based games
was the loading screens and music. Now, while waiting for a game to load, many of the titles
used to incorporate beautiful looking screen artwork and music, which made the process
much less painful. For example, Ocean Software, in particular, spent a lot of care and attention
in producing loading screen artwork and music. And games like Rambo and Green Beret come
to mind that have some beautiful Martin Galway SID tunes and some fantastic full screen Commodore
64 artwork, as least back in the day that looked amazing and really got you ready for
the actual game itself. So many of the software development houses spent a care and attention.
They understood the pain when it came to loading games from cassette and they tried to make
things as painless as possible and provide you with some really cool things to look at
and listen to while the game itself was loading. Tapes had no copy protection also, what that
basically meant was that if you had a cassette player or a boombox that had two tape players
on it, which you could record from, you could easily copy cassettes and trade them with
your friends. So, how much actual data can you store on a cassette? That’s a tough
question to answer, because the answer varies widely depending on what kind of computer
we’re talking about. Also tapes themselves came in various capacities from 30 minutes
to 90 minutes. Most manufacturers recommended using C30 tapes, which is 15 minutes per side.
Using one of those, some computers like the Commodore could only store 65K by default.
An Apple II could store 296K, The Tandy Color computer could store 329K and the Ataris could
do 131K. And of course, if you decided to use 60 minute tapes, those numbers can double.
And 90 minute tapes are even more. Now, where this gets really interesting is that if a
programmer used their own load/save routines, such as on a Commodore 64 with Turbotape software,
that number increases a huge amount, and stores considerably more than a floppy disk. So what’s
really interesting is that the loading speed is also drastically increased, which means
that with turbo tape software, the cassette tape now suddenly becomes competitive with
the floppy disk in both speed and capacity. Now there were so many myths about loading
games from cassette. I’ve heard so many stories about how it used to take 15+ minutes
for a game to load from cassette. Now in my experience, I’ve never seen that actually
happen. It’s usually a 2 to 5 minute process and there were so many turbo loaders or fast
loaders incorporated in the majority of games that I used to play, which would make the
process quite painless. So, if you were to just record a large program onto tape with
a C64, it seriously would take 15 minutes or more to save, and consequently, another
15 minutes every time you want to load it back. But that is primarily due to the fact
that the load and save routines that are built into the kernel ROM are just not very efficient.
If you take a look at this audio file, this is a recording of the game Commando. Now,
this section here is formatted in the original tape format. It has to be in order for the
C64 to know how to load the file. This piece of code is a turbo tape faster loader. Once
it is in memory, it takes over reading the rest of the file which is stored in a much
denser format. In fact, if you compare the waveforms from the loader to the game itself
you can see just how much denser it is. And you can hear the difference as well. If you
see these flashing bars on the screen during loading, that’s usually a sign that it is
using a fastloader.By 1985 the USA had abandoned the tape drive and everyone had moved to floppy
disks. Germany had gone pretty much the same way. However, Australia was still using tape
drives throughout the rest of the 8-bit era, as was the U.K. The primary reason for this
was, as modern vintage gamer pointed out earlier in the episode, that the cost of the disk
drives in those countries were prohibitively expensive.The other thing is, since I’ve
gotten on youtube, and I’ve gotten more active on social media, you know I’ve got
some British gamers that I follow and they’ll either re-tweet or post their own stuff about
the ZX Spectrum, which I also learned a little about just by reading retro gamer magazine.
I see a lot, they’ll pos these collections of Spectrum games that are of course all on
cassette tape. And I got to say, they look pretty cool. And if it wasn’t such a pain
in the butt to get a Spectrum running here in the U.S. I think I’d like to get one
and play around with it. It would be cool. I just never grew up with it and didn’t
have any idea that this was a thing until I looked into it. So maybe it is more interesting
to me than maybe someone who grew up with it. Either way, tape decks, audio cassette
interfaces are fascinating, I like ‘em a lot. Well, that about wraps it up for tape
drives, now stick around for the next episode where we talk about how floppy disks work.