The questions that might come to mind are probably myriad

[aminaas1573]

This sounds like it’s incredibly slow. Why yes indeed. The tarbell format/interface linked above brought in data at a screaming 187 bytes per second, that is, a couple short sentences worth of words. Compare that with a capability of 200,000 bytes per second of an early floppy drive and you can see why people would jump. (Naturally, modifications to the Tarbell format and alternative cassette tape electronics could increase the transfer rate to 540 bytes per second and above, but you’re adding complications.)

What even is a “Tarbell”? Oh, you mean Mr. Don Tarbell, creator of the interface in question, who wrote an extensive article about his work in Kilobaud magazine. (RIP to Mr. Tarbell, who died in 1998.)

Won’t it take a very long time to dump and read this phone number database data, at such a slow speed? Why, yes! That is the crux of this already-long article, coming up.

Is this the only way people ended up saving and loading data to cassette tapes? Why, no!



In the late 1970s-early 1980s, a myriad of cassette-tape based storage systems started being sold as an option for the “home computer” market, the plastic-wrapped, cheaper but all-in-one-already-built computers being sold by various companies in a bid to become dominant in the market. (Even the ultimately-winning IBM PC had a cassette port, although the system was generally sold with a floppy drive and it’s unlikely any significant number of people used it.) Each of these systems had slightly different approaches to how they wrote data on tape, and read it back, with speed differing notably between them.