Great to see a video of this in action! I've only ever attempted the diagnostic cassette myself, so this was a fun watch. I was looking out for IBM PC cassette stuff the whole time I was at Computer Reset last year but sadly didn't come across anything. Also that ancient LGR footage is painful, haha. Of all the videos that need a serious remake, that's near the top of my list.

3:09 LOL!

The knowledge this man has of archaic, long forgotten technology boggles the mind.....amazing!

I LOL'd hearing Dave Jones on your tape there!

I used an early IBM PC and a cassette recorder in school to save our work. I was so glad when I got to high school and their computers had floppy disks.

the unclosed quote at 10 minutes will give me nightmares

BASIC used 8-character file names. The extension was not part of the name, but a letter indicating file type: 'M' for data that was BSAVE'd, 'P' for a protected BASIC program, 'A' for an ASCII BASIC program, 'B' for a tokenized BASIC program, or 'D' for generic data. It would be hilarious if DOS included cassette support.

Very cool to see, even if it's extremely limited in use. Recording music to cassette using that port is equal parts silly and glorious!

My 5150 came as a diskless workstation. It had a ROM with Datalight ROMDOS and a special network card to be used with the MicroTICCIT interactive video system. Mine came off of the local Air Force base and I don't think it saw a lot of use.

Not the first one to do so.. I did this in 1984 on a borrowed IBM PC.. floppies were expensive, and I wanted something for loading/saving my basic experiments..

16:50 Electronic Arts! I wonder if they ever came out with any DLC for this tape...

I do remember my 5150 having a cassette port, never got around to using it for loading and saving programs but I did use the relay for some very early home automation to drive a second relay with 240v contacts. Surprisingly I didn't electrocute myself in the process!

Loading files from tape sounds like science

6:50 It sounds like a dial-up modem. C-10 tapes still exist in Japan.

The 5150 we had at the warehouse had the 5-pin connector hooked up to a Califone tape recorder. Whether it was original or not, I won't truly know.

Love the fact u can watch a Vwestlife video and the format hasn't changed in 10 years. Btw this reminds me i have a whole box full of new sealed computer cassettes bought at GB supermarket in Belgium, now long gone.

I appreciate you shooting this. I've always been curious how you would use the cassette port if you were bonkers enough to want to.

To be fair to Clint, that review is ancient.

It's kinda weird to think that we could've gotten Windows on a set of tapes

5:07 That "FWSHH" noise when he powers up the monitor brings back so many warm memories.

I had 5150 with 3rd party hd (10MB!) and 1,2M fdd. I was aware about the cassette port, but had not imagined any use of it, after my cassette experience earlier with Ataris.

3:13 that crossover is a real Bobby Dazzler!

I remember we did use the cassette interface for the very first month(s) we got our PC compatible. It only had 128KB RAM on board, and looked like an older "computer in a keyboard" type of thing. But it had 4 extension slots. So before we got RAM upgrade and floppy controller, we sorta played a little with loading games from cassettes. But although interface was way faster than on our previous computer (which was an 8-bit era machine), even the smallest PC games were way bigger, so loading was very, very slow. We couldn't switch to floppies fast enough. One interesting thing I remembered while watching the video: that cassette interface on our PC compatible must have been used to transfer some old data (mostly text files) saved on the old micro to tape. I don't remember the details, but there must have been some special software to read "foreign" tapes, as t I don't remember anything else that could have been used to transfer that data (we didn't have a sound card, and also software to get binaries from audio from old computer tapes didn't exist back then). I've looked in my archive and I found at least one text file I definitely remember typing on the old pre-PC computer. Feels weird looking at the text I typed in the 80s :)

Great stuff! Nice to see this finally demoed. I like how the diagnostic program breaks out of basic after the second phase of loading. I used to use Music Construction Set a lot on the Apple II when I was a kid and I think it does a better job of making 4 voices from the beep speaker on the Apple. What do you think? (Neither sound actually good though)

Those of us who were hobbyists back then used audio cassette recorders with our S-100 buss computers which were available many, many years before the birth of the IBM PC. Those computers ran the CP/M operating system.

Well, you did it. I actually learned something. I never knew about the MOTOR command or the CAS1: specification. And I always wondered how you'd be able to use the cassette from disk BASIC, not that anybody ever would... I had a PCjr growing up, and that indeed, as you had mentioned, had a cassette port and relay. I remember hearing that relay in the computer. In fact there was a program that took advantage of the PCjr's sound, written in BASIC if I recall, called Personal Musician. There were a number of pre-programmed songs in the program, and during one of them, the relay in the PCjr would click and all you'd get was PC speaker sound. In fact, the speaker on the jr's monitor would go silent, I could be mistaken but I believe that was done on purpose so you wouldn't get cassette program sounds playing on the monitor's speaker. Anyway, Personal Musician wasn't supposed to do this, it was definitely a bug in the program, and I never knew what caused it or understood it. It would leave the computer in an "inconsistent state" with the cassette motor running; I don't remember if a simple reboot would toggle it back off or if it required a full power down. Now I'm going to have to look for that disk that contains Personal Musician and see if it's still readable, and take a look at the source code so I can see what might have gone wrong. I am fairly certain that at age 13 or so, when I was the typical nerdy computer kid, transferring programs from disk to tape and back again through BASIC would have been at the top of my priority list. It certainly would have been something none of my friends had ever done. Wait, a nerdy computer kid with friends? I must have dreamed that part up. Would have been pretty cool to say I've done it, only to be dismayed that my next computer had no cassette port, nor provision for an adapter of any kind. The "Oh Christmas Tree" part, using the relay for the pendulum on the clock, was brilliant nerdliness at the most elite level. That's coding on the bare metal, right there. I had read about the music on the cassette port through Music Construction Set. Now it's been demonstrated, and my life is complete. It wasn't all that uncommon, I know a couple of Epyx programs on the Apple II would allow use of the cassette port for audio.

6:45 Ah, yes. The good old sound of bits and bytes. That brought back some long ago memories.

~le sigh~ that baud screech hits us in the feels...

This was the first computer I ever used. We had only one in the school, and I got to use it in kindergarten. It even loaded programs from cassette.

That's really cool how the IBM PC version of Music Construction Set could play out the cassette port. That's something the C64 version didn't (and couldn't) do, but then you could just hook up the audio out from the AV port to a regular cassette deck (not the Datasette) and record the SID output directly.

My vintage shows a little when I recall my early program input was via self punched cards admittedly on bigger machines than a pc. The cassette was a big improvement.

The tape loading noise sounds distinctly different from other computers, most likely to accomplish the higher data transfer speed.

3:12 Nice EEVblog recording here.

Inspired by this video, I tried something similar - using ham radio software called Soundmodem I recorded some text messages to the tape. Then I played it back to the computer and decoded it back. This actually works very well and without errors, because this software is designed to send packet radio data via radio, which can be obviously somewhat noisy.

It's so cool how tape memory works. The computer is essentially "downloading" the data from the tape, which I assume is very similar to how dialup internet works, since the sounds are very similar.

I remember that, for years, even when the built-in BASIC was long gone, the legacy code in most PC BIOSes would display "NO ROM BASIC, SYSTEM HALTED" when there was no HDD or FDD to load the OS from; only those initiated in the dark tape art of the 5150 knew what this message meant ;-)

Seeing my old tape deck (Tesla B115) in one of your videos was definitely a big surprise.

*"Model five-one-five-zero"* How formal. :-)

Who wouldn't want to listen to the program loading?

I still love the idea of loading and saving data to a ribbon of magnetic tape. Cassettes are fantastic, more interesting to look at and hold than an SD card will ever be (beyond wondering why the SD write protect switch isnt a switch) so it makes me all fuzzy and excited to write data to them just like when I was a kid and thats all I had (till I "borrowed" my uncles 1541 floppy drive which he never asked back so I guess its ok for me to keep "borrowing" it). Also, my first PC, which I actually built myself from donated parts, was a 486 built into one of these cases. I so wished that I kept the case.

Love your videos. I’ve been watching your channel for at least 10 years.

I have honestly never heard of using cassettes like this on an IBM PC, the only PC tapes I've experienced and used were DAT & DDS backup cassettes, which technically were doing the same sort of job, but not on a common audio cassette (well, bar the DAT tapes, I guess!!)...

"TANDY Corporation, none of that RadioShack rubbish!" Dave cracks me up lol

In the city where I was growing up (Kyiv, Ukraine) there were heaps of games sold on the cassettes for local IBM XT-like clone called "Poshuk 1", lots of games in fact - all pirated of course 🤪 9:04 hey I'm old enough even to remember I had to mess up adjusting the tape recorder's "head" (the component that actually reads the tape) with the screwdriver and adjusting the speed of the tape - adjusting the volume was the least of my worries.

Very interesting, Kevin! I remember saving and loading software on basic computers but never saw it used on a PC! 👍

Here is myt 2nd amusing tale on the IBM PC. In 1985, I went to a college class that taught keyboarding, Word Perfect, Wang word processors, dBase and Lotus 1-2-3. Well, In the keyboarding class, we used the IBM PC in cassette BASIC for keyboarding practice. Now, looking at white letters on a black background gets boring, wouldn't you say? Well, I knew the COLOR command in BASIC so I decided to spice things up and add color. Hey, it wss 1985!! I want color damnit! So I issued a color command and got some nice 16 bit color. The guy next to me saw that and asked me "Hey! How did you do that???". I showed him and he started messing with the color on his display. The person on the other side of him did the same, until the whole back row had these display with various colors. The teacher came over to see how we were all doing. She was startled and asked "How did you do this?". They all pointed to their left meaning the person to their left, but it looked like they were all pointing at me, who JUST happened to be at the far left seat. That is how the Color Wars of 1985 began.

We have the same ctr82. :D. I used mine with my coco. I knew the 5150 had it but I never had one to play with it. I couldn't afford a 5150 in the cassette days!

I have 2 amusing stories for you all. I'll post one here and the next one in a 2nd post In 1985, I went to a college class that taught keyboarding, Word Perfect, Wang word processors, dBase and Lotus 1-2-3. At the time, I had a Radio Shack Model III with 2 disk drives so I knew how to format and copy disks. One of the teachers was explaining how to do that. He wasn't a good explainer because even though I knew what to do, his explanation was confusing. So I relied what what I knew from my TRS-80. The commands were the same, though on the TRS-80 the main drive was :0 instead of A: and the 2nd drive was :1 instead of B:. So using my experience, I plowed through faster than all of the students. A couple of them asked me "Did you understand him???". I said "Nope, but I have a computer at home so I know how to do this. Now, before I go on, I want to ask you: Have you ever heard of someone self imposing detention on themselves? Well, I did. The other students asked if I could stay after and teach them. I said yes and for the next couple of days, I stayed aafter and help them. That's how I "earned" detention on my first day in computer class.

LGR, EEVBlog, what more? I want more! I love this.

Nice, I remember hearing Cassette BASIC mentioned before, but never actually saw it in action until now.

Gosh, the 5150 series PCs is a beatiful looking machine. Wish I had one.

Cool. I knew cassette basic was a thing on the original PC but never saw it working with an actual cassette.

When I was in graduate school, a friend of mine had one of these, with a tape player. I think it was 1982 or 1983. I thought this thing is silly. I was wrong.

Wow. Finally getting to see how this works, that's incredible! Thank you so much! The real gem here was hearing you can use Music Construction Set to record onto tape. I had no idea! That's really cool.

This was so cool. I didn't realize computers at one time used cassette tapes. Wow! There's always something new to learn.

Love the Mario ending!

We had a later XT and used the cassette port every day to back-up to cassette tape before shutting down. But it was so reliable we ended up only using it once a week. The cassettes were expensive and the tape speed was lightning fast, so the back-up rarely took longer than a minute.

I have often wondered about the cassette port, too! I never even saw an option to write to tape in MSDOS. Wow! I just finished watching and ... just wow! I have never seen that port work in all my years! Fantastic research you have done to get that thing working! I have a few XT computers laying around and I will likely use this video as a reference if I ever get around to fixing/repairing/using them! Also, very very jealous of your versacorder. I have been looking for one for ages and they are all broken/overpriced/ more recently complete unobtainium. I haven't even seen one for sale in a year. I ended up buying a panasonic RX-D55 unit since it also does MP3 cds and USB + tape. I just wish I had the option to do multi-speed tapes because you can record a whole talk radio show while you are asleep. *sigh* oh well...maybe one day I'll do a crazy mod on my RX-D55 to do multispeed. Other than that, I really have enjoyed my Panasonic. Great buy if you want a new full size tape player that isn't rubbish. Sure it's not a 1990s pioneer cassette changer with dolby noise reduction...but I never had that when I was a kid either. I just recorded music off the radio onto my reasonably priced single cassette boombox. If I wanted to copy a tape I had to use the family boombox in the living room. It had dual cassettes!

Oh, bless you. You did such a great job, even including Music Construction Set. Now I can finally cross this off my production list. Do you have an NEC V20 in your 5150? The BIOS cassette routines use loops for timing, so an NEC V20 could be throwing it off. Small correction: All PCjrs have a cassette port regardless of disk configuration they sold with. Finally, the official PCjr cassette cable did exist; I have one.

I've seen so many other retro computers with tape interfaces but I had no Idea the original IBM PC had one. great video & I learned something new today. Thanks!

Impressive! I’m actually toying around with fixing up a 5150 and was thinking of soldering together a cassette cable to do exactly the sorts of things you’re doing.

Copy Windows onto cassette. LOL.

This is like a documentation video for future IT-history archaeologists to be able to follow your path on the way of obscure, almost forgotten technology :)

I sold them in a store and well... yep, I used cassette on PC and taught people how to do it. In fact the first two I sold were cassette only.

This was really fun to watch, and I've always wanted to mess with it or see a demo of it. Thankyou!

Next year it will be 40 yrs old . Imagine that

Nice to see this feature in demonstration. I grew up with messing about with my grandfathers Model 100 Portable, but he had a PDD2, and for some odd reason I had used that model of tape recorder for studies but never found an actual cable to use it with the a computer. It wouldn't be until years later that I'd have an experience with the whole tape loading/saving functions, first on the Famicom, then later for a different Model 100 I got for some things I'm working on currently.

Wonderful bit of nostalgia. I spent a long time with (initially a System 80. a TRS80 clone. With 16K later taken to 48K). I know so well the foibles of cassette loading and tape quality . Actually ran a small business on it. Don’t get me started on the early printers.

Glad to see you’re still making videos! This popped up in my suggestions and instantly recognized your profile picture. I first watched your videos on an old account something like 10 years ago. Resubbed now :)

Knowing IBM if they had offered their own cassette tape recorder it probably would have been around $300 or even more. But also knowing IBM you would have been able to beat a battleship to death with it.

Oh that lovely sound of those characters blasting into your machine at a blazing 1500 baud! This is a great walk through. I had forgotten lots of the details... I don't recall my Tandy tape recorder having a "P" volume setting. Nice!

I bought a PC Jr new from my local Sears Roebuck business store for $800. I added several 'sidecars' for my specific company project. The budget wouldn't run to my buying a full PC XT. The side cars included Lotus 123 in ROM, a printer port and the cassette interface to use as an archival data storage device. I'm glad that I never had to resort to retrieving any data from the cassette 'archive'. On several tests I conducted I found the tape speed variation caused by non concentric rollers in cassettes internal tape path would result in serious read errors even at the very low resolution then used. The net effect was for me to make long printouts of the data archived 'just in case'.

Many years ago, I had computer called "Didaktik M", and at school we had computers named "PMD" and "Consul". All works with cassette player (by old rounded 5pin audio connector). The sound of loading or saving software/games was really "brutal", much better then old dial modems :-)

That trick of using the cassette's speaker to produce better sound than the computer's own built-in speaker is something I remember also being done with the TRS-80 Model III and 4.

From various technical books about the PC published when it was new, I'd been led to believe that the cassette recorder port was never fully implemented. I still don't think I'll tinker with it, but it's nice to know that it does actually work. If one could be scared up, a cassette deck recording at a higher tape speed might work with that DOS program.

I went to school in the 80’s and we had these computers. This was my introduction to the computer world. The cassette tapes had programs for elementary and middle school students.

Oh wow I had no idea about this. I had a 386 model 55SX once, (obviously too new for the cassette port) but it did boot straight into ROM IBM Basic, because the hard drive failed. I always thought at the time BASIC on these was just something to fall back to when the internal drives crashed for a bit of fun, not as a serious basic interpreter. I didnt even know any IBM X86 compatible PC could load and save from cassette, being from the UK - we was used to cassette storage, especially on systems such as the Spectrum, Commodore 64 etc. Great video i love the fact i could hear how the tape audio sounds too when loading (or saving), sounds just like a Spectrum actually just a bit different with the program header. Really enjoyed that video

an LGR slam?? I never thought i'd live to see this day.. You, sir have toppled the internet... :D

Oh, this is an EXCELLENT video, thank you! Excellent, thorough research, and it answers ALL of my questions about this enigmatic Cassette port on the back of my 5150...thank you!!!

Love that digital data sound!

People did this a bit here on the UK. IBM sold in pretty low numbers here in comparison to the US. They were hugely expensive and many users here that could just about afford one of these beasts often would to use the cassette port so they could at least recoup some outlay on then expensive floppy disks. R/F cards are more common (but still pretty rare) here too for the same reason. To save on the cost of a monitor due to people having lower incomes than the average US population. It also meant that different text and graphics modes were a breeze on standard television sets. Albeit crap quality compared to a dedicated display.

Computer Reset was indeed the place for anything PCJr... and it still is :-)

We had a cassette recorder for an Atari 800 system back in the day. I learned both DOS and BASIC on that thing just a few years before the first IBM PCs (and clones) were readily-available

Loved the EEVblog sample on cassette!

Enjoyed this - thanks. Just got out of storage the IBM 5150 that my dad and I picked up, as it was released. Got most of it working again (bad electrolytic capacitors for the most part) ... great fun. Enjoying your channel - subscribed - all sorts of interesting bits on it. Cheers

We used one. The deck itself was a loaner. Used it to load some basic programs to port to abasic. I believe the deck was from an Atari 400 with an adapter - but you supposedly could use any deck that could do mono if you have the PS1 adapter. No baud issues. The system did not come with the cable - at least our did not. The typing tutor was no-place to be seen (we had the disk versions though). Good video. I wish I had kept my old system. But ya know - they were not exactly portable.

Very helpful and comprehensive video. It's one of the main reasons I bought my IBM 5150! Thanks!

I remember these and the one I seen used the Tandy recorders too! Great memories! Thanks for the video! LLAP

The Radio Shack _Deluxe_ C-20s were the best computer cassette tapes. I'm not aware of any technical superiority they had over the standard C-20s, but the Deluxe ones were clear with that reel-to-reel interior that resembled those big mainframe tape drives. You know, how in old TV shows and movies when they'd show a big computer "thinking" hard they'd show those big tape wheels spinning.

Fascinating, especially the Music Construction Kit bit.

I don't know about the IBM PC line, but using a cassette for storage was fairly common on the TI-99/4A. Or at least it was in my house.

I had that exact model of tape "drive" when I had my CoCo 2 back in the day. What a fool I was to sell off all my old stuff lol

My first 2 computers use cassette tapes. First was the ZX Spectrum 48K, which I then upgraded to the Microdrive. One year later I sold it and upgraded to a Amstrad CPC464 which had a built-in tape recorder. I also upgraded it to the 3" floppy disk drive. My 3rd PC was a IBM compatible 8088 Turbo XT with dual 5 1/4" floppy drives, that was around mid 80s.

I have used a 5150 cassette port, with tandy ccr decks in the early 1990's, my high school science class had them, and we wrote programs in basic for chemistry and biology problems then would save them from basic directly to cassette. Then later the same year we got disk drives and also used an early CAD program, as well as LOGO to draw models, that we saved to disk. Logo would redraw every time you loaded it, because it just saved the draw coordinates.

Great video. I'm not very familair with the early IBM's so it surprises me even more there was a tape interface available.

Man, AMAZING! I absolutely loved this ♥

You just made my day, I have typing tutor. eBay here I come

I was recently checking out docs of the interrupt vector and casually found the int that handles casette data. It was quite an interesting find! But I have no cassette port to try this out

Nice video that brings back old memories. The Spectrum had a pretty good tape system, the Atari was cool when software made use of the stereo head, the C64 was nasty but my fav was the Work Slate computer / Organizer as that early 80's micro cassette was fully automatic which was pretty cool.

I still have this exact tape recorder with the cable for the coco2 and the black sleave