Plasma and krebizfan make a good case against audio storage taking off on the IBM. Just in case anyone mistakes the tone, what follows below is not me trying to start an argument, flame war, or make personal attacks. I'm just proposing an alternate view of what might have followed IBM embracing the audio capabilities of their "capture-all-markets" microcomputer.
Well buying a 5150 with no floppy drive would be like buying a luxury car with manual windows. It was a high end personal computer that was expensive to start with. Anybody looking for a cheaper option was likely going to buy a C64 or other home computer.
A 16K cassette only 5150 would cost more and be less effective than a 16K cassette only TRS-80 Model III.
True, but people were buying IBM's like crazy back then and IBM seemed to feel it was necessary to offer 16K machines without floppy drives. (Indicating they had no idea where this was going to go or that they wanted to aim at all micro markets.) The PC could be hooked up to an existing TV, saving on the price of a monitor. It had the cassette port to hook up to an existing cassette player, saving on the price of other data storage systems. As a home computer, it was expensive, as was an Apple II. But, it was an IBM! Logic doesn't necessarily apply here, especially in the early '80s. I remember coming across magazines for kids with really simple IBM BASIC program listings in them, so kids could learn programming with the IBM PC at home. This shows at least some kind "recreational" home computer market existed for the IBM.
IBM also charged a lot of money for those empty slots and bays. Now, a 64K+ IBM PC with cassette could do more than the Z-80 counterparts but for business, the upgrade to disks was a no brainer. 64K takes about 6 minutes to load off cassette.
Did the cassette port ever seem like a viable business solution on any microcomputer? I think the cassette port was aimed at the home computer market. Upgrading only the computer's RAM to 64K+ and not adding disk drive(s) would be a cheaper upgrade and allow cassette programs to perform closer to their 8-bit home competition.
Cassette usage for IBM PC compatibles was an interesting oddity.
True. Why was it included in the first place? My guess is to make the 5150 a competitor to every micro on the market, no matter what target audience. Perhaps a hedging of bets to make the projected high volume of sales seem more believable to IBM execs.
CD players were too expensive to use in support of computers in the early 80s. 1984 was when Sony introduced the first $500 CD player. Floppy drives look quite appealing in comparison.
Yes. By 1984 the cassette port was essentially the IBM PC's/PCjr's appendix. No one seemed to really have done anything with it to capture the public's interest. But, if cassettes had already become popular, the CD player as a medium for software might have looked attractive to the home computer buyer. Not only can you play high quality music, but you can also use it to load video games, etc! If you were already going to spend the $500, you would get this option as a bonus.
Also remember: In 1987, when CD-ROM was really expensive, "Microsoft Bookshelf" was launched to promote/encourage the adoption of the technology. The same kind of thing could have happened with audio CDs.
The other problem is audio storage is inefficient at only 10kB per minute with the 5150 and similar cassette routines. Even placing different programs on the right and left channels still means only a little more than a megabyte could be stored.
Then again, the most common disks being used to publish programs at the time were 5.25" 360K in size. A single audio CD could take the place of three of those. As the industry progressed, file compression was used to stuff more on the same disk. This could have happened on the audio side as well. We got expansion cards to improve everything else in a PC, why not improved cassette ports with faster, more data per second algorithms?
Cassettes are interesting from a historical perspective but for everyday use they suck. So if you are a software developer and 99% of your market has a floppy drive, you are releasing on floppy.
The CD instead of cassette was an interesting concept once the 90s and cheap CD players arrived but mostly would be gimmicky cover discs.
Unless the cassette port was well established as a publishing medium. Even in the early 1990's, ZX Spectrum programs were still being released on cassette. And as mogwaay said:
Also in Europe there was compilation Audio CDs of games and for some computers - Nostalgia Nerd went through some of them a while back, for the ZX Spectrum and Comodore 64 I think
Granted, the Spectrum had started out with only cassettes. By the '90s, however, Spectrums could also have disk drives. The question really seems to be one of pursuing the low end market, which IBM had no reason to bother with when they were raking in cash on the disk-based systems.
Lest I forget, there were two advertised sets of software on cassette in the US. AFAIK, neither was released in cassette form. One was MS's Typing Tutor as seen in 5150 catalogs. The other was Home Computer Magazine which offered the listings on cassette for the PCJr.
This makes me think that the success of the disk-based market was surprising enough to cause the IBM team to focus exclusively on it. Also, they really blew it trying to target the home market with the PCjr. Again seeming to show a mindset geared toward the higher end/business market that was IBM's normal field. The problems with the PCjr were also on the consumer side, expecting a cheaper version of the IBM PC "tank" they already were using at work. Not the cheaper yet lightweight, somewhat incompatible, less indestructible "thing" that appeared on the shelves. (No offense meant to those who love the PCjr. From what I've heard, this was the public opinion of the time.) The Junior's cartridge system never took off and cartridges were a big medium on IBM's home competitors at the time.
On a final note, and getting back more on to the original topic of this thread, one of the real mistakes I think IBM made with the PC cassette port was not integrating it into the disk-based side of the system. Being able to transfer to disks by yourself the programs you previously bought as cheap tape versions would have been a boon for the upgrading consumer. Conversely, transferring disk-based programs to tape (which mogwaay did for PC-Man) on your IBM at work, so that you could use the program you bought at home, would have been a boon to the lower end consumer. This should have been a simple DOS command like COPY and totally automated for the user. Instead, IBM sold everyone two separate computers in the same box and only supported one of them.
I think if this conversation is to continue any further, we should start a new thread, perhaps in a different group.
Basicode had routines that could use the IBM PC cassette port or a parallel to cassette adapter for XTs or ATs to get radio broadcasts of software converted.
This is interesting. I wasn't aware of any cassette option at all for the XT/AT series. Can you post a link to any further info about the adapter? It might be a way for mogwaay to be able to try his PC-Man tape file on a machine he owns. Would it work for his TXjr?
@mogwaay: I hope you haven't minded this digression from your thread. I would like to see further PC Booters converted to tape. My list above would be a great starting point, I think. It's an interesting, if not "really useful" project for seeing what the capabilities of the neglected side of the PC/jr are. (So neglected, for example, that I remember coming across a PC magazine reference that suggested the only use for the cassette port was to make "motor boat" sounds.) It would also be great if someone can confirm this process works on real hardware. After you've done a few of these, I'd think you should be able to program a MAKETAPE command for DOS that does the work for you.