Software and either experiencing
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 3:40 am
We are, as a whole, incredibly lucky at how the state of in-browser emulation, built on open standards and persisting through most modern browsers, allows us easy insight into historicalor re-experiencing these bright lights of brilliant code. But we must also realize that a lot of what we are interacting with in the present day are, top to bottom, towering piles of shortcuts and “we’ll just skip ahead”, trying to accommodate a type of user that has no time or patience for how things were once.
And this new type of user, ignoring or unaware of the lost minutes any choice could be, find it harder and harder to relate to what came before, the environment that those creations were made in.
Perhaps if you have a spare few minutes, a lull in your day, you might consider browsing the stacks of the Ultimate Tape Archive and finding a compelling cassette tape cover, look over the phone number database JPG scans of the cassette inlay and printed instructions, and “press play on tape”, feeling some moments of anticipation as another gifted person’s efforts provided you with a chance to experience a very complex joy emanating from a very simple machine.
But what is exactly ending up on these audio cassettes (now considered to be data cassettes, or datasettes)?
Particularly curious folks can read up about examples like the Tarbell Cassette Interface and Protocols here in the bitsavers collection. But in more general terms, a variety of standards (and not-so-standards) had emerged where pulses of sound went onto an audio cassette, and these sounds reflected individual data that could then be interpreted coming back off the tape.
And this new type of user, ignoring or unaware of the lost minutes any choice could be, find it harder and harder to relate to what came before, the environment that those creations were made in.
Perhaps if you have a spare few minutes, a lull in your day, you might consider browsing the stacks of the Ultimate Tape Archive and finding a compelling cassette tape cover, look over the phone number database JPG scans of the cassette inlay and printed instructions, and “press play on tape”, feeling some moments of anticipation as another gifted person’s efforts provided you with a chance to experience a very complex joy emanating from a very simple machine.
But what is exactly ending up on these audio cassettes (now considered to be data cassettes, or datasettes)?
Particularly curious folks can read up about examples like the Tarbell Cassette Interface and Protocols here in the bitsavers collection. But in more general terms, a variety of standards (and not-so-standards) had emerged where pulses of sound went onto an audio cassette, and these sounds reflected individual data that could then be interpreted coming back off the tape.