Wow. Now that is really, really, REALLY cool. I'd not seen a continuous loop cartridge used for data storage in this manner before. I'm surprised you weren't interested in this, I think it's amazing! You know, if you're not interested in it, I have a good home for it... lol. But, that's interesting, and the continuous nature of the tape creates some issues for recording, I suppose it's designed with fixed size program blocks for filling a fixed amount of memory with data from tape to run the equipment the 8/M used to control. Wonder if this is used as a standalone program without an OS, or if there is an OS that supports running from this sort of tape? That is *really* cool, and I look forward to hearing more about what you uncover about it! -Ian On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 12:38 AM, Kyle Owen via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
This may be too beyond audio cassettes, but I figured I'd share.
I never really was interested in this portion of my first PDP-8 haul, but I ended up with a Tennecomp Fidelipac drive. For those unfamiliar, these were commonly used for commercial breaks in radio stations and the stations' jingles. Similar to 8-track, but they didn't have a built-in pinch roller.
I have yet to see if the unit is functional, and need to figure out where the interface card is (if it came with the interface, even), as I would like to digitize the tapes. Fortunately, I've got a friend with some radio station cart machines, so I could possibly record them to audio files and reverse engineer them from there.
So yes, even a PDP-8/M, ca. 1974, and possibly prior, used an audio tape system for data storage!
Pictures here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/kBL9gRGF697A0xUT2
Kyle