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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of an old hacky product that would let you use cheap VHS tapes as backup storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

You would hit Record on a VCR and the computer data would be encoded as video data on the tape.

People are clever.

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Early games and software would be delivered on audio cassettes that would then have to be 'played' in order to load your software temporarily into the device, which could take minutes

edit: Video from the 8-bit Guy on how this worked - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9SM9lG47Ew

Wow, 2GB on a standard tape. For the time, that's incredibly efficient and cheap.

Yeah. Video, even old grainy VHS, had a pretty high bandwidth. Even much more so with S-VHS, which did not become super popular though. (I'm actually wondering whether the 2GB figure was for S-VHS, not VHS. Didn't to the math and wouldn't be surprised either way, though.)

A normal VHS encodes about 100 million scan lines over 2 hours. 20 bytes per scan line sounds feasible, since there's somewhere around 200-300 'pixels' of luma available in each scan line.

Thanks, that's a very reasonable back of the envelope calculation.

There are many fun details about VHS, its chroma resolution, and especially some weirdness around the PAL delay line, but they all don't really matter for this.

Wikipedia says there is about 3MHz of bandwidth, so ~200-300 "pixels" seems like a very good ballpark (just going by the fact that a normal PAL signal has about 6 MHz and is commonly digitized as 720x576, 3MHz about halves the horizontal resolution and taking some pixels off for various reasons makes sense).

This is old school. When I first wrote code back in the Stone Age we used to store our stuff on cassette tape.

I still have my Atari 400 and tape drive!

My family had Atari 400 with a tape drive. I remembered buying a tape with a game. We also use it for basic programming language and the Astroids game using a cartridge.

Yep, I had the BASIC cartridge and used the tape drive almost exclusively for that. Coded up all sorts of little projects on that machine. I hated the membrane keyboard, but it worked!

You had cassette tape?? Lucky... I had to write my 1's and 0's in the dirt with a stick.

Damn rain.

You guys had dirt?

You guys had atoms? When I was a lad, there were only photons.

You guys had ? When I was, we weren't.

You guys will have spacetime and causality? I wont have that when I will be a young lad.

Ha ha, when I was a kid with my C64, I used my moms old reel-to-reel tape deck to store data.

I still have a C64 and tape drive.

There was a magazine in the 80’s where you could scan in the code with a bar code scanner.

The Alesis ADAT 8 track digital audio recorders used SVHS tapes as the medium - at the end of the day, it's just a spooled magnetic medium, not hugely different conceptually than a hard drive.

That's not really that hacky, audio cassettes were used forever, it's just a tape backup.

Yes! There were many such systems, LGR made a video for one of them, also showing the interface (as in: hardware and GUI) for the backup: https://youtu.be/TUS0Zv2APjU

I remember a similar solution that was marketed in a German mail order catalogue in late 1990s. It could have been Conrad, but I'm not 100% sure. I recall it being a USB peripheral, though. (Maybe I could find more about it in time...)

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