Maximum bitrate for storing information on home-quality cassette tapes?

[krebizfan]

Portable computers and calculators did often go for the disk drive over tape for the comparatively faster drives* attached to a serial port. The port itself would be the same speed. The owners of the unsold stringy floppy inventory wished it had been otherwise. Of course, slow audio tape had the virtue of being very cheap to implement.

Tape over 10KB/s would have needed something along the lines of a Sinclair Microdrive. New drive heads, new tape formulation improve handling of the data at the rate the heads worked, all put into working order before the disk drive volume pushes those prices below what the fast tape could be sold for. There were a number of companies that advertised high speed tape solutions that went out of business quickly because they couldn't convince enough to pay more for unproven tape than proven disk.

*These would be the 40 track 3.5" drives, the various spiral disk drives, stringy floppies, and a number of other devices that were too slow to see use in performance computers.

 

[cjs]

Tapes aren't that inconvenient for home application - it's only once you need to work with directories that it becomes an issue.

Many "home" applications, such as basic word processing, are far more convenient with a random access medium such as floppy disk. Futzing around with winding to the right spot and the like is a huge pain for many of us, and the time spent doing that generally is going to destroy any speed advantages a super-fast cassette tape might have except for some very particular situations where you're relatively infrequently loading one large file (e.g., for a large game that still fits into RAM).

Had tape on a C64 been over 10KBytes/sec, no one would have ever bought a disk drive for it.

That is trivially easy to disprove: I would have bought a drive regardless because I find easily access to multiple files to speed things up massively for me, whereas overall load speed isn't nearly as big a deal.

I think you may be confusing your preferences with general preferences. I also have a suspicion that you've not actually tried this; try putting your editor, assembler etc. on tape and doing a few edit/assemble/run cycles and you might change your mind.

 

[cj7hawk]

Many "home" applications, such as basic word processing, are far more convenient with a random access medium such as floppy disk. Futzing around with winding to the right spot and the like is a huge pain for many of us, and the time spent doing that generally is going to destroy any speed advantages a super-fast cassette tape might have except for some very particular situations where you're relatively infrequently loading one large file (e.g., for a large game that still fits into RAM).


That is trivially easy to disprove: I would have bought a drive regardless because I find easily access to multiple files to speed things up massively for me, whereas overall load speed isn't nearly as big a deal.

I think you may be confusing your preferences with general preferences. I also have a suspicion that you've not actually tried this; try putting your editor, assembler etc. on tape and doing a few edit/assemble/run cycles and you might change your mind.

I did clarify home use, and home use in the 1980's typically did not involved word processing or assembly. Sure, you could do those things at home, but neither would have been typical home use of the era - Most people didn't even own a printer or write software.

I did also acknowledge earlier that I was talking load times, not random access requirements such as selecting a specific file - or the kinds of application where you would need to do that on a single media.

But yeah, my call on "nobody" was a generalisation and I shouldn't have said nobody. All it takes is one person to prove me wrong... I should have said "almost nobody".

Aside from random access requirements such as the examples you gave, most people in the 80s just wanted to get their game running. And they got floppy drives because they wanted their games to load faster.

I did also do some early assembler and word processing on my Spectrum, saving to tape. It wasn't too bad. I just put in a long tape and continually saved, over and over, and noted the last start position in case it crashed the system. Having a microdrive did make that easier, but it wasn't that bad. Of course, this meant my program was saved revisionwise dozens of times on the same tape, each one the next revision... But that also has advantages to it you know? And it didn't take too long to save a small program that was stored in memory as text.

Though I did have a fast seek on my tape player so it wasn't too bad if I had to zip through a tape to find the last program on it.

 

[cjs]

I did clarify home use, and home use in the 1980's typically did not involved word processing or assembly. Sure, you could do those things at home, but neither would have been typical home use of the era....

I wouldn't be so sure. When my mother bought an Apple II+, the primary purpose was word processing. And even before she bought it, on the Apples at school I was playing around with this EDASM diskette that happened to show up somehow. Was my household unusual, or was yours? Hard to say. But apparently you were on a Spectrum, which never even had a floppy drive until 1987, at least from Sinclair.

I suspect that "happy cassette tape" is more a cultural thing than anything to do with speed or convenience. My understanding, for example, is that in the U.K. Commodore 64s were typically bought without a drive until quite late into the computer's history. But when I worked in a computer shop in Canada in the early- to mid-80s, I sold a lot of 64s but don't recall ever selling even a single one without a floppy drive.

 

[vwestlife]

8-Bit Show and Tell has a good video debunking the myth that "nobody used cassette tapes on Apple IIs and C64s in the USA", although he does show evidence that software on cassette tapes for those machines virtually disappeared by 1983-1984. Cassettes did hang on longer in UK/Europe, but by 1986 Sinclair and Amstrad were introducing models with a built-in disk drive rather than a built-in cassette recorder.

 

[cj7hawk]

Portable computers and calculators did often go for the disk drive over tape for the comparatively faster drives* attached to a serial port. The port itself would be the same speed. The owners of the unsold stringy floppy inventory wished it had been otherwise. Of course, slow audio tape had the virtue of being very cheap to implement.

Tape over 10KB/s would have needed something along the lines of a Sinclair Microdrive. New drive heads, new tape formulation improve handling of the data at the rate the heads worked, all put into working order before the disk drive volume pushes those prices below what the fast tape could be sold for. There were a number of companies that advertised high speed tape solutions that went out of business quickly because they couldn't convince enough to pay more for unproven tape than proven disk.

*These would be the 40 track 3.5" drives, the various spiral disk drives, stringy floppies, and a number of other devices that were too slow to see use in performance computers.

The Sinclair Microdrive was just a type of stringy floppy - but proprietary. It worked pretty well and was close enough to a disk system for all practical purposes to fit the task.

It sold because it was cheap. And it was cheap. Quite a lot sold. But far less would have sold if the home cassette speed was anywhere close. Transfer speed of a microdrive was 80kb/s x 2channels ( 160 Kbps ) so around 20 Kbytes/sec, and it took 8 seconds to loop. You had to 2:1 interleave though so that meant 10kbytes/sec effective speed, and maybe 8 kbytes/sec was a reasonable speed, and it was available from 1983. It meant you could load 48k in around 6 seconds once it came around. You could also spread it through a tape with multiple sectors ( not even a hack - it was in the manual ) for both redundancy and reliability.

Microdrives were actually pretty popular, but failed not because of the technology ( which was pretty good for the era ) but because they were very difficult to duplicate, so it wasn't convenient or cost effective for most people to distribute software via Microdrive Cartridge. Some did, but not much. The QL suffered for the same reason.

Going for the 3" Disk Drive in 1986 wasn't much better a solution, though quite a bit of disk based software did at least show up, but more commonly software was just sold on tape since it was economical and was the lowest common denominator.

 

[cj7hawk]

I wouldn't be so sure. When my mother bought an Apple II+, the primary purpose was word processing. And even before she bought it, on the Apples at school I was playing around with this EDASM diskette that happened to show up somehow. Was my household unusual, or was yours? Hard to say. But apparently you were on a Spectrum, which never even had a floppy drive until 1987, at least from Sinclair.

For some reason I don't imagine you as an avid gamer... And I would have loved an Apple II -right up to 1986. By that time, I was starting to work, and the PC had taken off so I went straight for the disk. Spectrum keyboards were functional, but not exactly ideal for typing.

I suspect that "happy cassette tape" is more a cultural thing than anything to do with speed or convenience. My understanding, for example, is that in the U.K. Commodore 64s were typically bought without a drive until quite late into the computer's history. But when I worked in a computer shop in Canada in the early- to mid-80s, I sold a lot of 64s but don't recall ever selling even a single one without a floppy drive.

As @vwestlife noted, they were more popular than you imagined, but as memory capacity went up, tape speeds didn't follow - that was their primary downfall. Unfortunately it's an issue of ROM based computers that they can't be updated to take advantage of new technology developments either. The way the microdrive worked was particularly painful because of that. It basically monitored access to the BASIC ROM and paged it out when the error handler determined there has been a syntax error. If it was caused by a disk command, it handled it, otherwise it paged the original ROM back in and returned to it.

 

[krebizfan]

The Sinclair Microdrive was just a type of stringy floppy - but proprietary. It worked pretty well and was close enough to a disk system for all practical purposes to fit the task.

I meant the actual String Floppy from Exatron. They had the trademark and all. After a number of misadventures, the Stringy Floppy line was sold off to A&J Microdrives which repositioned the product for the Tandy Model 100 and similar machines. Since the Model 100's external storage was capped by the roughly 2 KB per second speed of the serial port, it was one of the few cases where the choice between disk and tape was not determined by speed. Disk won despite the various disk products being much more expensive.

 

[cjs]

Unfortunately it's an issue of ROM based computers that they can't be updated to take advantage of new technology developments either.

My understanding was that this wasn't a real issue as far as faster CMT formats: the systems where CMT remained popular into the '80s had "turbo" loaders that would load a small, standard-format loader which would the load the rest of the tape much faster, did they not?

You can look at which systems did this and which did not to see where floppies were popular and not.

 

[vwestlife]

The Atari 8-bit computers had another solution to provide fast loading times without the expense of a disk drive: cartridges. Especially upon the release of the XE Game System in 1987, when many formerly disk-only games were re-released on cartridge, now that higher-capacity ROM chips were available.

But things didn't work out so well for Commodore and Amstrad when they tried to do the same thing (make up for lagging sales of their 8-bit computers by re-releasing it as a video game console).

 

[whartung]

In high school, we had someone donate 4 PET computers, but even better, they donated several hundred 15m (I think) cassettes for storage.

So, we just used them, one per program. It worked really well, and handy since the PET did not have a tape counter on the built it tape. Mind, they were 8K PETs, so we were never waiting long for anything. But it was an overall positive cassette experience.

I did experiment with using the tape as a rewritable medium to try and write data records, to where I could, ideally, selectively read and write them. But that was just a disaster.

Mind, when I got my Atari 410 recorder, I did not enjoy that experience at all and bought a disk drive as soon as possible.

 

[cjs]

8-Bit Show and Tell has a good video debunking the myth that "nobody used cassette tapes on Apple IIs and C64s in the USA", although he does show evidence that software on cassette tapes for those machines virtually disappeared by 1983-1984.

I'm not sure his anecdotal evidence really debunks that, especially not for Apple, where he didn't show a cassette tape made after 1979 (the year after the floppy drives were introduced). The one exception is the Avalon Hill multi-platform games, where there was no extra cost to distribute Apple II cassette versions since they were on the same tape as the the other more "cassette-oriented" platforms, but they did produce a disk versions as well. (I think the disk version of Voyager II may have preceded the cassette version.) I wonder how many people really played the cassette versions on the Apple II.

Again, this sort of seems to come back to a cultural and platform thing: people buying cheap platforms (generally outside of North America) seemed to go with CMT, probably because it was the cheapest option, and people buying more expensive systems (such as the Apple II, or C64 in North America) tended to go with floppy drives.

At any rate, this is pretty much all anecdotal evidence (except perhaps my experience of selling C64 systems in the early/mid-80s). Maybe someone out there will find some stats at some point.

 

[cj7hawk]

I'm not sure his anecdotal evidence really debunks that.

It does a reasonable job, and I have boxes of old computer tapes... They existed. He's correct.

But if someone could afford an apple ii, they could probably afford disk drives. The lower cost the computer, the more that every dollar saved is critical. You probably walked in circles of wealthier people and it may have affected what you consider to be baseline common equipment.

My first '86 PC didn't have a case, and I made the monitor for it out of an old video game RGB monitor. It wasn't very high resolution, but I could read 80 characters on it (just). My FDD was a full height that someone had upgraded to a half-height. Fortunately, I was able to get a ST225 HDD and had 20Mb of space. The keyboard and motherboard were clone KT Technology parts. The PSU was an old Video Game switching supply. But I also had my first job to pay for it. When I had a Spectrum, a Microdrive was the best I could hope for.

If you have money, you get the cool stuff straight away. Otherwise you just get whatever you can afford that does the job.

 

[cjs]

It does a reasonable job, and I have boxes of old computer tapes... They existed. He's correct.
...
When I had a Spectrum, a Microdrive was the best I could hope for.

If you have money, you get the cool stuff straight away. Otherwise you just get whatever you can afford that does the job.

Ah, ok, so we are in agreement here, then. Tapes did exist, and people buy what they can afford, and on the low end they either couldn't afford drives (early C64) or they weren't available (Spectrum).

I thought you were saying something more along the lines of, "People wouldn't upgrade to floppies even if they were available and could afford to," or "people might have stuck with tape had it been faster to load, even though it was otherwise far less convenient than floppies in most circumstances, and even if faster to load, still overall slower to use."

His coverage in the middle of C64 tape games nearly vanishing by 1985 matches what I remember of the era.

 

[vwestlife]

A better question to ask is, what was the last home computer in the U.S. that had a cassette tape interface, but did not have a disk drive available from the manufacturer? (Not counting portables or educational toys.)

All the ones I can think of were released in 1983 and flopped in the marketplace:

Panasonic JR-200U - January 1983 - 1984
Mattel Aquarius - June 1983 - October 1983
TRS-80 MC-10 Micro Color Computer - June 1983 - 1984
Timex-Sinclair 1500 - June 1983 - February 1984
Tomy Tutor - June 1983 - February 1985(?)
Timex-Sinclair 2068 - November 1983 - February 1984
Texas Instruments TI-99/2 - announced January 1984 but never released

 

[cj7hawk]

Ah, ok, so we are in agreement here, then. Tapes did exist, and people buy what they can afford, and on the low end they either couldn't afford drives (early C64) or they weren't available (Spectrum).

I thought you were saying something more along the lines of, "People wouldn't upgrade to floppies even if they were available and could afford to," or "people might have stuck with tape had it been faster to load, even though it was otherwise far less convenient than floppies in most circumstances, and even if faster to load, still overall slower to use."

His coverage in the middle of C64 tape games nearly vanishing by 1985 matches what I remember of the era.

We're usually in agreement more often than not - and when it seems we're not in agreement, we're just describing the same elephant from two different directions.

Floppies would *always* have eventually replaced tape because of the random access nature - some applications simply don't work on tape. Not just business - even savegames and the like. They did do it on tape, but it was much better on disk.

But if audio tape from a normal cassette player was 10 Kbytes/sec instead of the typical 200 to 300 bytes/sec, then people would have used tape for a lot more applications, and I think this would have slowed widespread adoption of disk drives and prolonged the audio cassette era.

Also, the Spectrum Microdrive may have technically been a tape, but it was *like* a floppy drive. If they found a way to make it as cheap as tapes, extended it's capacity to 640K ( this is possible, I've done it with the help of others ) then I think it too would have lasted longer - perhaps to the end of the floppy drive era - but that would have been a big ask of the tech... As for having it - well, it was the Sinclair answer to floppy disks, and it did work well enough - Some aspects were fast, others slow, but generally it performed a little better than the 1541. Actually, make that a lot...

 

[vwestlife]

You can really blame it all on the C64. It was the most popular home computer, and also had one of the slowest cassette tape interfaces (300 bps). The IBM PC's 1500 bps cassette interface feels positively snappy in comparison. I'm not sure how big it is, but IBM's Advanced Diagnostics takes only about 3 minutes to load from tape. For most people that would be perfectly tolerable -- not 10+ minutes as was typical with C64 programs.

 

[krebizfan]

European computer cassettes took advantage of a number of improvements thanks to starting development later.
Effective data storage routines were proven. Look at the early US cassette interfaces. Many were both very slow and unreliable.
Cassette quality improved making it possible to sell 125 million music cassettes in 1982. A good clean signal benefits all audio.
CD production resulted in unused cassette production facilities that computer duplication utilized.
Increased memory meant overlays weren't as needed. Wordstar and Infocom are examples of how disks were used in lieu of RAM.

Another European advantage was a special postal rate for cassettes. If cassettes were much cheaper to distribute, lots of budget software could continue. I think that kept the cassette around even after disk drive prices had fallen to the level of cassette decks.

Note that much faster floppy drive technology also existed but never got much traction. X10 would transfer at 2.5 Mbps. The Sony 2" floppy was rated at 1.7 MBps or transferring the entire contents in about half a second.

 

[vwestlife]

Another European advantage was a special postal rate for cassettes. If cassettes were much cheaper to distribute, lots of budget software could continue. I think that kept the cassette around even after disk drive prices had fallen to the level of cassette decks.

Vinyl flexidiscs were even cheaper to distribute than cassettes, but the idea of a "Floppy ROM" never caught on.

Note that much faster floppy drive technology also existed but never got much traction.

2X and 4X speed 3.5" floppy drives were used in Sony's Mavica floppy disk cameras in the late '90s and early 2000s. They also sold a 2X speed USB floppy drive for computer use.

 

[cj7hawk]

Sending out programs on plastic 33RPM records and 45 RPM records was possible, but it was a terrible idea.

The number of times you could replay it was limited, and it only took the slightest of scratches, or dust, to end your loading experience - and the retries took hours.... Before you eventually gave up.

I had only one experience with them in the 80s. I never want to repeat it.