The history here is wild!
Links ‘n’ stuff:
Oh, here’s the mentioned link before I forget:
Techmoan’s video:
LGR’s video:
Technology Connextras (my second channel where stuff goes sometimes)
Technology Connections on Mastodon:
The TC Subreddit
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The area the OSD covers in the upper right corner is not a data field. That's just noise.
Everybody here is talking about audio stuff while I am just amazed how your VCR is always displaying 12:00 PM.
Can you make video on ArVid? It was made in Russia in 1992.
That "Backer" backup product surely could have been improved to hold more data if computers of the day could have handled it. I suspect that no PC of the day could have read the tapa at it's capacity.
Fascinating piece of video/audio/digital history and tech explained. Thanks
The television was the color of the sky above the port.
Cool
makes me think of an oscilloscope
I remember burning discs back in the day
Back in the day I used to store Amiga programs and data on a VHS tape recorder, using a SCART to RCA cable and an interface I built. Damned if I can remember much about it now.
The answered because it's slow and sequential. You have the data, but can't access it immediately as in an HDD
Wow! You scooped @techmoan on this one!
29:00 – What about BROADCASTING that digital video?
29:30 – I exploited the long recording time with VHS-HiFi! I ripped a bunch of my dad's CDs when I couldn't afford a CD player!
i can kiiinda follow along with what youre saying here, but 11:03 i was staring at the screen like a child on christmas
I remember my brother recording analog audio from the radio onto video tape but that was mainly because he got more recording time on VHS versus his reel to reel. The other advantages VHS had over reel to reel was he couldn't close the doors on the stereo cabinet if there were reels installed and of course VHS was a heck of a lot easier to load and unload than having to thread the tape.
One weird use of video tapes that I remember was Showbiz Pizza (the predecessor to Chuck E Cheese). The video section of the tape contained all the command signals for the pneumatic valves that made the robotic members of the RockAFire Explosion move, and the audio had the standard two channel stereo sound that contained the voices and music/
Commodore 64 games, at least in Europe, were stored on audio tapes back in the 80s.
Thats not PCM
Many small studios (including the one I worked in) during the late 80s and early 90s were using these to record masters to old Betamax machines. It provided an easy way to spit out copies to clients.
I've still got a Danmere Backer in a box. I think I used it half a dozen times. It worked ok, but was clunky. At the time the 3GB or so seemed fantastic.
PCM was first transmitted in World War 2 – search for SIGSALY
I have a pro-sumer grade PCM2500 DAT machine, which aside from being beige and using XLR connectors, and of course the adjunction of a DAT tape drive, strongly resembles this earlier consumer device, and shares many components with it. Of course the inclusion of a DAT tape drive very much enhances the machine’s raison d’être, and the sample rate is switchable between 48Khz (the EIAJ standard for DAT) and 44.1Khz, meaning it could at least theoretically be used as a mastering machine for compact discs. More insidiously, it has a switch to lift the “copy inhibit” bit, making it possible to record perfect digital copies from commercial CD’s – the only non-fully professional machine I have seen that could do this, not that I ever would have considered doing so, obviously. It is twice the size of the machine featured here, in that the upper half, with the DAT drive is exactly the size of this machine, but an additional unit of equal size mounts beneath it in piggy-back fashion and contains the digital processing (which today would be done in a chip the size of a dime, and would contain 16 channels of 48-Bit 192Khz.
That was very interesting. When I had a job as a teenager from 1995 to 1997 as a rapper and clean up boy in a meat department of a grocery store, I did have some cutting duties but it was the wrapping machine that fascinated me. It was likely from the area you are describing and it used an audio cassette to digitally feed each week's prices for each product into the machine so that when we enter the product code it priced it properly. I remember observing my boss programming and audio cassette in the office where they had the device to put in price data and converted to an analog cassette tape and then loaded on the machine in the Meatpacking room. Quite fascinating and I never fully understood how it works but now I do. I've been a lurker up until now but I really appreciate your content!