Trigger on my Atari 600xl took quite a while to load via cassette...having a floppy drive was heavenly in comparison.

You are a wise man to have kept your old gear!

@@BertGrink I try to hang on to everything, rather than waste money by keeping up with the Joneses. Here is a picture of my old stereo system. ibb . co/jSWGOo ( Remove Spaces ) I built the speaker cabinets back in 1978. So they are now 41 years old, but they still sound as good as new. Although, I did eventually have to replace the outer rubber rings on the two 12" woofers, since the old rings had literally begun to turn to dust, due to old age. The two replacement rings only cost about $25. Everything else is still working. The DENON DCD - 900 CD player, the Soundcraftsmen PE - 2217 equalizer, the Yamaha CT - 800 AM/FM tuner, the AKAI GX - 630D reel to reel recorder, and the Heathkit AA -1506 power amplifier, all are working fine. These were all purchased between 1976 and 1978, with the exception of the 1987 DENON CD player. The DENON CD player started skipping, but all it needed was a couple of drops of electric shaver oil, put in the right places. Now the LED mechanism could shift quickly and smoothly again, as it moves across the CD being played. Oh, I forgot to mention the 1976 Pioneer PL-510 turntable, which is still working fine as well. Who knows what this stuff is worth these days.

@@BertGrink Here is a picture of the Heathkit Hero 2000. ibb.co/qFSMwbd and ibb.co/F4tK2V2 I still have to de-yellow the lower front plastic section. You can see in the example, just how yellow the plastic had become in some areas.

I've used a Galaxy S3 on various vintage computers to feed it with analog tape sounds to load stuff (ZX81, ZX Spectrum, C64, SOL-20, Camputers Lynx) :)

Everything is better then a samsung

@@jantrammelant every thing retro is better than anything modern

I would like to see a recreation of that game

What? The C64 tape deck did not emit any sound. As a matter of fact, the C64 had one of the most reliable and easy-to-use tape decks specifically because it was made by Commodore and did not transmit actual audio to the computer, the cassette deck itself did the analog to digital conversion and automatically adjusted the tape gain etc. So I don't know how you would ever have heard anything like this using a C64?

I remember the System 80 but I bought (and assembled) the Super-80 kit from DSE. It even worked (after I fixed a minor error I made during assembly) And after I figured out that BASIC (on tape) for that machine was junk, I got a book which had TRS-80 BASIC listed in hexadecimal, gradually entered it into the Super-80 and then modified it so it would work with 32 characters per line instead of 64 characters per line, as well as redirecting its cassette tape routines to the ones in the monitor ROM. Fun days. Nowadays though, you can get a similar thrill from playing around with Arduino and PIC, and figuring out how to make them do what you want. And you can get heaps of boards and parts which will work with them, without having to take out a second mortgage on your home. :)

So true i think that's why i enjoy Unix type OS's too

Ahh, the era of type-ins! I remember the time fondly; my friend got a ZX Spectrum in 1982 or thereabout, and since there wasn't a lot of commercial software available, he bought a lot of magazines. We would then take turns typing in the listings: one of us would read out the various instructions while the other typed them in. This would go on for maybe 30 to 45 minutes, then we would take a coffee and "smoke" break, and switch tasks. Rinse and repeat until done.

Bootstrapping that thing requires more patience than 99% of the world has.

Yes, the basic principle is exactly the same, only the bit rate is probably lower than the Spectrum's. Fellow Speccy fan here :D

Nope. Imsai 8080 is a clone of the Altair 8800. The Altair is the original

@@japanfanatic1415 What they meant is the Altair in this video is not an original Altair but a clone Altair developed by the guy making the videos. However he does also feature real Altair hardware in other videos.

It's pretty much a modified modem running at the same frequencies and 300 baud speed of the Bell 103 standard, which was set in 1963. Some codes are even intercompatible if programmed specifically and correctly. This variety is called "Kansas City Standard" and was standardized for all computers of that time to require this form of tape loading as a failsafe measure in 1976.

+F_A_B123 nice profile pic

I miss my US robotics 14.4k. That thing had the biggest speaker I have ever seen on a modem. There was literally no way you were sneaking onto the internet at night.

Might be too late to be useful but the modem command string ATM0 would shut the speaker off.

Better late than never... I still have a collection of commodore modems, in hopes that an analog telephone replacement technology comes down the pike along with some serious hobby usage. Ie BBS related stuff. I know there are a few options currently available, but i havent played around too much with them

My favorite dial up modem was made by 3com. It was a combination ethernet router and dial-up modem. Any time one of the three networked computers made an internet request it would dial out to the ISP. After a certain amount of idle time it would hang up. Imagine three computers sharing a dial-up.

Neat!! As long as you werent downloading images im sure it was fine. I remember text html was decently fast on dialup

***** Here's a link to a zip file with audio of several versions of BASIC and more: altairclone.com/downloads/cassette_interface/BASIC%20Tapes.zip With the right cable, two terminals can talk to each other. Everything you type on one shows up on the other and vice-versa.

I would recommend the max232n chip, since it does all the heavy lifting for you, including the serial line voltage generation, baud rate generation and outputs TTL for the bus to use on the TI99. Then you can just send bytes directly over serial using your serial port on your PC, and a simple listen and write to memory program you could whip up in a few hours of hunting for the correct address of the memory mapped I/O. If the TI99 has a parallel port, that would be the spot to use/monitor for incoming bytes. I cant remember [the max baud rate/default] but the baud rate can be selected as well using the pins of the chip I believe via the use of pull up resistors.

I can't say for sure. I remember doing it back when it was state of the art and used cassette tapes. 9600 would have been on the high end of the frequency range for cassette, likely it was 1200, 2400 or 4800

But you just a box

It does seem so: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_standard#Computers_using_the_Kansas_City_standard

Gabe Alexander the "rec" button, along with the csave command.

Hey, your that pony that hangs out with that diamond tiara ! (I also didn't know you could speak french?) and yeah, I was looking at it from the point of view of the computer, rather than looking at the pre existing technology for audio recording and reproduction, lovely way to get a serial signal going, is audio

Gabe Alexander well, humans from the eighties used to have cassette recorders for the same purposes in the eighties, like, with a commodore, atari, amstrad.. ...tape remains about the most advanced storage technology we have here in Equestria.

Also MODEMs, allowing us to "dwarf" terminal users kilometres from here, acting like a remote server, responding to every command they send, it's always worth it.

Still using modems eh? makes me wonder what kind of cpus are in the most powerful equestrian data processing devices, like TTL cpu boards or have you gotten integrated circuits yet

300bd ASCII 7-bit

Drachenreiterklaus Daar tai koona putiraat

It's sort of possible. There is a program called WAV-PRG that can take a Commodore 64 PRG file and output it as audio. (c.f. wav-prg.sourceforge.net/wpfaq.html )

Michael Hall Thanks Michael, I'll have a look at that now :)

Good point...Also you can use modern tapes like the LTO format, which store terabytes of information.

From what I have heard it is massively slow compared to modern data transfers, so GL to any company with that as the only offsite backup they have available.

you can...

we can still experience this stuff today though, more conveniently :)

LeiserGeist Yes sure, also with more ease. But still I wish this was my every day thing to work with.

What is stopping you from it being your every day machine?! I use my retro gear to do day to day computing all the time. The only things they can't really do is multimedia applications like video(which you can do from your phone or TV anyhow). Things like spreadsheets, word processing, etc. Math especially! These old machines are great for plugging away it math problems. I will admit though, sometimes on bigger 'try and compare' problems it does get tedious waiting the 12 hours it is computing using basic. Those are better done in machine language. I remember my VIC 20 sat there for 2 days calculating something one time.

Well, barring that, i did manage to snag some s-100 sockets a while back. Worst worst worst case scenario, i can build a case and backplane, and then buy some s100 cards ebay. Id rather have this though. Those sockets were around 8$ a piece though so i will definitely do a wire wrap backplane someday. I wish he included a pin terminal breakout of the s100 bus though...would mean i can do some of the neato s100 dot com boards like the 80386 processor card for instance.

But then maybe you would never have seen these things! I don't think many people had an 8800 back then. Maybe you would like to enjoy what I am doing at the moment: I chose a year (happened to be 1985 but could be any year) and restricted myself to only music, films and computer stuff (emulation allowed) that existed at that time. I set January 1st 1985 (retro time) = January 1st 2018 (real time), and I set retro time to run 8x faster than real time; this way I will eventually catch back up with present day (but I will probably stop at year 2000). I've only been doing this a couple of days and already it has been a really fun experience, finding old magazines and music I had not heard before and learning to use and code on a Commodore 64; I am currently enjoying playing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and reading Compute! magazine. (I'm waiting for the January 1986 issue to come out in retro-time before I let myself read it haha.)

Wow, you must be coolest guy in the hood...

AirScholar same

Well then, you have the most powerful Christmas card in the world.

Then put your xmas card up in your shithole and be happy with it (y)

Not initially; however this machine, as well as the Imsai 8080. spawned a huge "scene" of homebrewers who quickly figured out how to make interfaces for keyboards, monitors, tape decks, et.c. AND how to write the programs that made the hardware usable. This was then followed by commercial endeavours, which in turn gave even more people access to this new world. The rest is, as they say, history. There are plenty of videos here on youtube which document that time, in case you're interested.

Next step: smoke signals

That Computer does not need an OS! It could run CP/M, Basic and many Other. But it does not need an OS to run Programs.

Some guys do I love my BBC mrico

You can do everything but multimedia on these(unless you count 'ladders' as multimedia. You can even go on the internet.

Crap? How dare you! This computer was the granddaddy of all subsequent computers, including the phone you're probably watching this on.