There was a small rubber sucker attachment that you could stick to a TV screen, with the light pen attached. The BBC (tv station) had a programme (probably MicroLive) that would overlay a flashing block on a small section of the screen. The light pen would read that flashing and you'd have a small program.
Here's someone talking about it:
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/02/18/ian_mcnau...
The BBC (and Sinclair, and possibly Amstrad) did a lot to make computing accessible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKmu68URUeI
I recall seeing a torrent of the full series a while back - I'd like to think that it's probably still possible to decode the programs even today. :)
4 Computer Buffs also transmitted some software as audio, usually over teletext pages or the test card, while the channel was off air - again, see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4gRgcnj8lg
One of the BBC programmes - either 'The Computer Programme' or 'Making The Most Of The Micro' transmitted a BBC Micro program as audio, too, but they intentionally kept it very short so as not to offend viewers who didn't like the noise.
That said, they lengthened the broadcast as a result of transmitting the program at 300 baud - they did tell everyone at home to make sure they typed *TAPE 3 (i.e. to crank the loading speed down to 300 baud rather than the Beeb's normal 1200 baud), presumably to strengthen the chances of some usable data actually making it through. :)
My current car stereo I bought for $75 has only a USB port, and I stuck a 32G thumb drive in it with gawd knows how many tunes are on it. Mucho better. I enjoy inflicting disco music on anyone who dares to ride with me.
I still have a tape player in my car. (My car is 15 years old, with a proprietary stereo moulded into the fascia, so as long as I have this car I'm probably stuck with it.) I have one of those tape adapter things so I can listen to music played through my phone. Quality is OK, but every now and again the wheels get stuck, the stereo switches sides, and the music goes off. It's 2015, and cassette tape technology is still causing me problems. I can hardly believe it.
Cassette tapes were bullshit, and I can't believe people can't see it.
We've already had people wanting CRTs back. I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV?
Just your typical hipster trendiness nonsense. Anyone who grew up using cassette tapes knows exactly how awful they are, and are glad to be rid of them. At least they didn't try and bring back the 8-track :P
> I dread to think what's next. A floppy disk revival? Long play VHS? Black and white TV?
CEDs, definitely. "The analog nature makes movies so much warmer!"
Even if a tape did get a dirty spot it could generally play through it and you'd notice a degraded picture for a second or two. A scratch on a DVD often rendered the entire movie unplayable. Cassette audio tapes had this same advantage over CDs.
That said, I prefer streaming to either one by a huge margin. Hard to believe that we used to pay more for a single movie than a Netflix subscription costs for a month.
But hey, why not. :)
I see little children having curiosity about those "cassetes" thing, but it is a five minutes thing. I actually lived casettes and HATE them. I sold all my collection, burned the piece of furniture that held it in a night of San Juan fire.
Great memories (the fire and the party on the beach, it became useful after all).
Now with just Garageband and audacity I could do 100 times more that I could do with cassetes and hold thousands of times more recordings and songs without the nonsense analog noise in my pocket.
I couldn't help when I read PR like this to think that someone else needs to find "a bigger sucker" in order to get rid of their cassete junk in their parent's garage or something and make a profit out of it.
In 2015 CDs sell for as much as $15? Wow, it is not like people could connect to youtube, download any song of the world with youtuve-dl with better quality that cassete could ever dream about. And better talk about even more outdated tech like vinyl without talking about itunes or dozens of music web sites and social networks as alternatives for "music lovers" so the article does not sound as the piece of PR it is.
Oh, cassette tapes are great for people with kids! Unlike CDs or vinyl, you can hand over the collection with only limited risk of damage, as they are substantially scratchproof and unbreakable even when used as ballistic projectiles or impromptu teething devices. Durable medium!
(Occasionally one will have its guts ripped out, though. Nothing's foolproof.)
That's quite a condescending and misinformed attitude. Tape recordings have never gone away in certain music scenes, and those scenes are occupied mostly by older music listeners for whom it's a matter nostalgia or aesthetic preference.
Tape hiss goes well with certain extreme styles of music, IMO.
This was actually one thing leading to minidisc's demise. The DRM doesn't allow you to extract your recordings digitally. They fixed this eventually, but it was too late and flash memory had already taken over.
I think another thing sunk it, write speed.
To write to Magnet-Optical media, you first use a laser to heat the surface until it becomes magnetic. Then you zero the bit using a readwrite head much like on a HDD or floppy. Then you set it to the zero or one you want to actually be.
All this back and forth means that MO can't really keep up with HDD or flash.
It was very expensive, and apparently not fast enough to use effectively "online", and required SCSI; so relegated to the backup market and competition with commodity tape.
This article says a little about the errors of splitting MD between audio and generic data http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm
Amazingly sad. Typical Sony ?
So I'm actually pretty surprised to see a revival of interest in tapes. But I get it: its not about the sound quality. Its about the physicality of the container, about the process of making mix tapes, etc...
(Note: there are a lot of things you can do to drastically improve the sound quality of a tape: buy better quality tape, record at high speed, use DBX noise reduction (dynamic range compression), etc. But this article is talking about the bottom of the barrel: cheap tape which can be played in anyone's walkman).
I think one of the main reasons cassettes caught on is that people could make mix tapes. Even after I adopted CDs, I always had cassette players and recorders around for mix tapes (until later, when recordable CDs and the computers to record them with became much cheaper).
Any revival (I've literally heard of this from nowhere except the article) is probably due to the nostalgic feel combined with the ability to make mix tapes.
