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.
