mai gawd it sounds like “Merry Christmas Santa Claus” by Max Headroom
I’m not sure you’ve seen this series of videos, but in case you haven’t, they cover the development of the CVD in pretty good detail. I found it fascinating since I’ve been the the Sarnoff Museum and seen a lot of the history on display there.
6 Likes
That reassuring weight of those backup tapes whose bottom side was one solid slab of aluminium, though…
2 Likes
So no Shark Drives then?
I was with it before they changed what “it” meant.
QIC that would be. I have a bunch of those. I do prefer the solid block of plastic feel of the DECtape/DLT.
3 Likes
One magnetic medium missing from the video: steel wire.
This medium was put to great use in the fabulous Binson Echorec, an analog audio delay unit used by, among others, Pink Floyd. The wire was wound around a spinning aluminum drum, to allow for continuous recording, like a tape loop, but with greater reliability, frequency response, and S/N ratio. It’s some fascinating gear!
9 Likes
At least he wasn’t this guy:
2 Likes
No kidding there. It’s ridiculous how long it took to load software from floppies back in the day. My cable connection can transfer that amount of data in a fraction of a second.
2 Likes
years ago I was shocked the first time I saw a real world use of storage by wire, because I had previously seen it on a Outer Limits episode as data storage for all the humans from the future held within a time traveling robot trying to save what was left of humanity. the rest of the plot was so outlandish I had thought the wire was made up too. XD
3 Likes
A light-hearted trip thru the Wayback Machine. The punch cards reminded me of a conversation with an older co-worker. I was lamenting the inconveniences of having to run decks of punch card programs into an IBM mainframe.
“You’re spoiled,” he said. “At least your cards are interpreted.” (meaning that when a line of code was coded into the card by punching holes - the the alpha-numeric text was simultaneously written in the top margin. This was an incremental improvement.)
“In my day, the cards weren’t interpreted. If you dropped a deck, to put them back in the right order you had to hold each card up to the light and interpret the punch holes yourself.”
Decades later, the Matrix "operator’ streaming-screen reminded me of that conversation.
8 Likes
came here for this.
I could forgive not having familiarity with the three-letter-acronyms I.R.S.& R.E.M. I’m sure he’s at least heard of the band but both of those could easily blur into some obscure tech designation, e.g. DVD-R, CD-ROM etc. but the only other printing on it said “Pretty Persuasion” which would seemingly indicate it had nothing to do with the Internal Revenue Service as he speculated and is easily searchable.
So, yes, I was like “holy shit, the Pretty Persuasion video!” but seeing how his collection is just formats, the actual media seemed almost universally terrible, I guess looking up every single thing only to find out it’s some crappy religious or children’s programming probably gets old quick. So I get it, but that was so shocking to see something so cool in there that he was completely oblivious to.
other than that, I bet that Terrytoon 16mm film was probably cool, that’s the studio that did Mighty Mouse, IIRC.
everything else seemed pretty wack
edit: @ugh I’d never actually seen that video but those whirligigs are all on “outsider artist” R.A. Miller’s land and he’s the old guy wandering around in the video. At first I assumed it was Howard Finster, who also did the cover art for that album (Reckoning) and one of the Talking Heads’ LPs, too, but not so:
so that U-matic cassette would be collectable for the art market, too.
3 Likes
More on CED with a lot of hand’s on:
(This guy’s YouTube channel is a real k-hole of amazing retro hardware content.)
And another, equally bizarre video disc format:
4 Likes
One thing to note is in the magnetic tape category where you have compatible media such as 8mm. The difference between data and video tape media was the coercivity. The force needed to write the data. The higher the coercivity tapes were used for data tapes. The point was they were less likely to have bits flip when they weren’t supposed to. The higher coercivity media more expensive. They were error prone if used in audio media writers which did not produce a strong enough magnetic field to write the bits on the high coercivity tapes.
7 Likes
Another format category that has been mostly forgotten are the various belt formats, both magnetic and stylus/groove, (like a cylindrical flexi-disk). There was the Dictabelt, and the IBM’s Magnabelt line.
Utilizing the fact that a rotating cylinder provides a method of random access along with the ability to disengage the drive screw and create a fixed loop, Holger Czukay of CAN used the IBM’s for a pre-digital compositional sampling technique.
3 Likes
Second proper job I had was working for a print/publishing company, and they had an early Addressograph/Multigraph photo typesetting machine, which ran from punch tape. The typesetter just sat reading the manuscript and typing away, the output was punch tape that would be wound onto rolls about 8” across, then run through the setter to output type galleys of tect on white film paper. The bloke in charge developed the knack of being able to read the tape, and could edit it without needing to rerun new tape! It was just holes to me!
He later set up another business, and I followed not long after, which is where I started using a Mac, and Zip drives and DAT tapes were very common, all of the backups went onto DAT tapes, Quark files, images, everything, and even now, twenty-odd years after that business folded, he’s still got all of those tapes, along with the Retrospect software on an old c1999 Mac, and gets the occasional enquiry for an old job! Extraordinary, really, but DAT is a good archival system, better than optical
3 Likes
I had an after-school job at a small printer’s in the 1980ies. Anything for the photo typesetting machine got typed up on a CP/M PC (in Wordstar, I think) and sent to another company that had a Linotype, on 5.25 in floppies. Stuff that didn’t need fancy fonts was printed in-house on a daisywheel typewriter/printer, we had about 10 wheels with different fonts for that.
Then the Apple Mackintosh and the LaserWriter hit the market. I think we even had the 512kB model, or upgraded from the 128kB model. Anyway, suddenly I was doing DTP with Aldus PageMaker on a machine with a 9 in b/w display, one 3.5 in floppy drive, no HDD. Which meant that every three minutes or so you had to swap the programme disc with the data disc, and vice versa. Still, it was a revolution.
My experience with DAT backup tapes is not entirely without tales of woe. At the time I chose DAT over writeable CDs because it was significantly cheaper. CDs would have had enough storage space, I didn’t have huge amounts of data to be backed-up and archived. But the tapes were a lot cheaper than the CDs.
Anyway, reading a tape back on my drive always worked when that tape had been written on my drive. Reading tapes written on other drives sometimes was a problem. My pet theory was that since the hardware was basically a very small VCR, the read/write head had to be adjusted just so on both machines.
But all that was moot just a couple of years later anyway.
2 Likes
Interesting - and something I did not know. I always wondered about the use of digital video tape for data purposes and remember being surprised for a second or three when I first learnt of 8mm tapes being used for data, and then thought ‘meh, it’s all just data anyway’. Now I know there was a difference.
I’m so soft and spoiled; I got to learn PageMaker on an SE with 1MB of RAM and an actual 20MB hard drive!
2 Likes
3 Likes
Interesting trivia about magnetic tape. Thousands were used to store Landsat satellite data at the EROS Data Center in SD, mag tape being the best $/Mb at that time. When more durable archive media became economical & transfers began, it was found that many of the tapes had deteriorated & the data feared lost.
It was found that baking the tapes could temporarily restore the binding material enough for 1 more playing to complete the transfer and a wholesale ‘cooking’ process salvaged decades worth of data.
6 Likes
