As an owner of a few Amstrad CPC systems, I can say that loading things from cassettes are a choir. They are alot more popular here in the UK than in America, who tended to have floppies regardless of the extra cost. 😊

It takes about 5 minutes to load a typical game on the Amstrad. And if you saved a document on a cassette and forgot the name, you're going to have to CAT "catagorise" command to list the contents of the cassette. Then rewind it, load up your document programme (another 5 minute wait) and then load your document. To save time you could have noted down the counter number for the particular document on the media.

Remember to leave a couple of good seconds space distance between each file (I say file 😲 ) too!! Any overwrite at all will cost you the integrity of the file. These points are why the counter is so important.

Also, being that you can only really get c90 tapes now, the motor band will likely slip trying to pull the reel through, therefore (as is probably required anyway), you will need a tougher/tighter band.

As far as PC's with cassettes are concerned, I gather only certain programmes would be able to access the data, seeing as there is no protocol for reading/writing to cassettes within an out of the box DOS command prompt???? 😕 😕 Obviously this IBM has the capability, but is it merely a diagnositcs check or has it a more substantial use for general public ie data transfer?

IBM 5150! Very few uses for the cassette and very rarely used.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_cassette_tape

It mentions that the computer BIOS could remotely control the tape recorder. How would this work? Did IBM release tape drive units specifically for this machine, or maybe these commands worked with IBM tape drives from other systems?

I'm not really sure.

8-bit computers used cassette as storage, but I don't know if IBM PC "tapes" were standard cassettes or another tape technology. At that time, open reel tapes were used on mainframes; other tape technologies included microdrives (used in ZX Spectrum) that were small endless tapes.

About controlling the tape recorder: some older cassettes had "REMOTE" inputs (as 2.5 inch jacks or in DIN 5 connectors) that allowed computers or other devices to control the tape, but not a full control: you pressed PLAY and the computer could let the tape run or stop it after loading. That kind of control couldn't rewind or advance the tape, but at least could pause the tape until the computer was ready to load or save data.

BTW, a ZX Spectrum (rated at 1500 bauds, similar to IBM PC) took about ten or twelve minutes to load 128Kb. I guess that tapes were intended for 64Kb computers (the very first IBM PCs)... think about loading 512Kb using a tape.

Gotta admit I'm shocked there was an IBM PC that utilized tapes. I was always under the assumption that it was the older 8bit systems (amstrad, sinclair, etc...) that used those to hold software.

Then again, I cut my teeth on 5-1/4" floppies, so I missed out on the tape trend.

How could you emulate this on a modern computer? Your emulator would need a perfect image of the original IBM PC ROM.

2fort5r wrote:

How could you emulate this on a modern computer? Your emulator would need a perfect image of the original IBM PC ROM.

That's not out of the realm of possibility. If the usual suspects in the ROM dumping community were interested, they'd find a way. I imagine it would be more difficult connecting the tape drive to a modern PC, as you'd need an adapter or custom cable , and a driver for it contained in the emulator itself (and maybe one for windows/linux/Mac). The emulator may need to also be able to emulate the tape drive itself, if image files of the tapes could be made from the originals. Like using floppy disk images in a virtual floppy drive.

That sounds difficult, and unnecessary: you could just use uncompressed WAV files of the tapes.

I wrote about this sometime ago, perhaps it may assist with this discussion :

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2014/04/t … ibm-pc-and.html

That's very interesting, thanks. It seems to have used stock Radio Shack cables, which included a 'remote' connector:

http://www.8bit-micro.com/data-cable.htm

So it appears that IBM never released any dedicated PC tape recorders. And I didn't know commercial software was produced that utilized the PC buzzer as an instrument:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Construction_Set

2fort5r wrote:

It mentions that the computer BIOS could remotely control the tape recorder. How would this work? Did IBM release tape drive units specifically for this machine, or maybe these commands worked with IBM tape drives from other systems?

There's a small reed relay on the 5150 motherboard that turns the tape motor on or off, via the aforementioned remote plug.

I think most early cassette tape recorders were dictation/stenography machines. They weren't intended for computer data or music. ("Hi-Fi" cassette tape capable of playing music at LP/R2R quality either didn't exist in those days or was prohibitively expensive.) I assume the 'remote control' panels on these devices were originally designed to be connected to a stenographer's foot-pedal.