[olug] OT: But funny

[Thomas D. Williamson]

Quoting Will Langford <unfies at gmail.com>:

> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 7:32 PM, T. J. Brumfield   
> <enderandrew at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> http://www.geekvintage.com/images/commodore-64-1530-datasette.jpg
>>
>>
> on our nec 8086 we just hooked up a regular cassette deck to the back of the
> keyboard.... although we had an excess of floppies hanging around from a
> warehouse that dumped a bunch of their inventory cheaply... so other than
> the amusement of listening to the recordings on a regular stereo once or
> twice...
>
> and of course everyone here has undoubtedly taken a pair of scissors or a
> xacto to a 5.25" .... or pieces of tape ... etc :)
>
> Not really 'vintage' -- but did anyone ever have one of those VHS based data
> archival things ?  You'd basically just feed it off the shelf standard VHS
> tapes.  It was marketed as a poor mans backup solution... but I think had
> failings due to variable quality of VHS tapes.
> _______________________________________________
> OLUG mailing list
> OLUG at olug.org
> https://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug
>

I tried one of the VHS back up cards in a 486 system. I never got the  
thing to work, it seems like I got an error having to do with  
initializing the tape. I think it had to write a particular header at  
the beginning of the tape before it could write the data, and that  
part failed. I wasn't sure if it was the card, the VHS machine or the  
tape. I did buy a pretty high quality tape at that time, but it did  
not seem to make a difference.

The picture reminds of the Osborne portable a friend of mine had with  
the dual 8" floppy disk drives one for booting the C/PM the other for  
running the application and holding data. It was the video monitor  
that seemed the most bizarre, the small screen in the middle of the  
case.


Tom Williamson

----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.