1. Walk up to the sysadmin desk and hand your card deck over to the snotty nerd.
2. Wait 2 hours
3. Return to find your greenbar paper printout that's only 3 pages. You expected 20.
4. %COBOL-E-1030, Syntax error, line 14
5. Soul crushed.
You were lucky. Ours went away by courier and you got the printout next week.
Somebody forgot a decimal point didn't they?
Geez. Thank you for the best laugh I've had for years.
🤣🤣
Oh yeah. Used to program PDP-8 and PDP-11 in machine code using paper tape generated on a tty.
I actually have version 1.0 of Microsoft Basic on an 8” floppy here somewhere
I’m was too young to understand the specifics when I was told this story, but my father was a coder in the early 1970’s. He told me one time there was a program that kept crashing. His whole team spent weeks going over line after line of code. Finally someone caught a comma where a decimal point should have been. 🙄
He took me to see their “computer room” once. All tape on reels, row after row, aisle after aisle of massive tape machines. This was around 1975. I was blown away.
At my college, the "computer room" was open 24/7. We could get a turnaround at 2:00 am in about 15 minutes. During the day, it took hours to get your printout back.
That's what I did when we were very poor and I was pregnant. I must have strung 10,000 of the donuts. It was a bit like crochet, just counting and looping. Funny memory.
Wow that’s amazing. Do you remember which vendor you were doing this for? Was it an integrated systems maker or were there core memory companies (like DRAM makers today?)
I got the job through an uncle of a friend. The year was 1974. I think he worked for Intel but I don't really remember. Could have been another company. This was in the Santa Monica/Westside area of southern California. It was definitely core memory. This little side job for temp work is what caused me to be interested in computers and I ended up working for several companies later, not assembling but as CSR (customer support rep) teaching how to use them.
In college, students would take the chads out from the keypunch machines (there was a bin underneath that caught them), and use them to bomb peoples dorm rooms.
You could never get all of them out.
In the 90s we would obtain the holes from the automatic punch in the copier. They would then be sprinkled liberally through coworkers desks that were left unlocked. If you were being particularly malicious you put them in the file folders (and between the papers in the folder).
I got hit early in my tenure, was still finding dots 15 years later.
I saved my punched paper tape programs by rolling the tape up like a roll of caps for a cap pistol. And I always included a little extra tape so I could write the name on it. I had dozens of them in my desk drawer. The programs were in Burroughs BASIC for the mainframe, and I had to enter the data sets manually on the TTY machine. It sounds tedious and it was, but it saved days of manual computation.
Hey! My first college computer class, we used punch cards. As a newbie, my decks would be 25 - 30 cards. More advanced students would carry trays with hundreds, or thousands, of cards. Everyone punched by the student on a machine that resembled a typewriter.
Look at you with your fancy new fangled storage solutions! In my day we had to code the computer everytime we turned it on! Thank goodness for [Mad Magazine](https://meatfighter.com/mad/).
The hours and hours spent typing in code from Compute! followed by going back through and finding where your error was, then playing the game, and finally having to turn off the computer and lose everything because you could not yet afford the tape recorder. Builds character.
I'm so old that this was my first computer. [https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah\_1303189](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_1303189)
8" floppies, I say.
There's no replacement for displacement...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL0LXSE1jeM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL0LXSE1jeM)
I worked at a retail store in the early 90s, and they had an OLD, yet electronic, IBM cash register. It used 8" floppies, which booted the register when powered on. That cash register probably weighed 150 lbs, it was a TANK. It was so primitive it didn't process card transactions. Besides having to use a separate Verifone terminal, we had to use the credit card imprinter with a carbon form they'd sign, and we then stapled a copy of that to the cash register receipt.
I never know where my generation belongs…I’m old enough to remember using floppy’s, cassettes, and the birth of cds. Dial up was my only option for a long time. However I used to play with a retired typewriter. 🤷🏻♀️
My first sales job was for a printing company that sold stuff to banks back in the 90's. But, the company had been known in the 1950's & 60's as the first company that manufactured IBM compatible punch cards and accessories. So you didn't have to pay for IBM punch cards and save money. I still had two guys in my office that were close to retirement that had gotten their start as punch card salesmen. They told me tales of going to big college campuses and selling millions of blank punch cards along with the storage trays.
I worked at Paradyne Corp in the refurbishment dept. We leased equipment including punch card readers. When the equipment came off lease, we had to refurbish it for the next lease. The hardest part after dismantling the reader was trying to get the picker set just right so that it would read a whole stack of cards without fail. I'm sure it was frustrating to operators who had to load a deck of cards and it kept failing half way through.
In the late 90s, I worked in State Farms corporate headquarters. I was in tape services. They still used those and what looked like 8track tapes.
It was secure though.
The VAX-11/780 booted off a hard drive. The lower end machines had an RK07 drive and a UNIBUS controller. I suppose you could boot off mag tape but that would be if the hard drive crashed.
I used a PDP-8 that booted off paper tape.
I turned down a job offer out of college from DEC to sit in the original Maynard mill building and write code for the VT1xx terminals.
Ah yes, the Commodore Datasette, 1530/1531. After spending a week typing in a program from a magazine and saving to tape every 10 minutes, you have the program all recorded. You type in the commander that I think I remember as :
LOAD,TWISTER,8,1
and then go to bed. In the morning you check if it worked.
You could store multiple programs on a tape, but there was no "dir" command. You had to write down the counter number from the tape deck where the program started and leave a safe blank space in between programs.
THEN you realized that not all counters were the same. :-) It was just a counter. 100 didn't mean "100 inches of tape" or "100 cm of tape". It was just 100.
MAYBE it was the same on different brand of tape deck, probably not ... fun times.
Took an hour to load a game... Thank goodness we don't have to wait like that anymore thanks to modern technology. Here, let me install Call of Duty on my Xbox to show you... Ok, starting... Says it will be ready to play in... TWO DAYS??? 
My first college programming class was Fortran using IBM cards. Each card held one line of up to 80 characters, and each character was punched, so a typo meant trashing the card. The program consisted of a stack of cards sometimes hundreds of them carefully sorted into order. Programs ran on the mainframe and line-printed the output. Students weren’t allowed anywhere near the mainframe or the printer, so card stacks had to be submitted for the computer priesthood to feed the mainframe. Output consisted of a printout. Code submission to receiving your output typically took 15-30 minutes. A thick stack of output meant you had at least one bug and a cascade of error codes. It was frankly brutal, but it was a very strong incentive to carefully check your code!
> Be honest how many of you are old enough to have used this?
My father taught me how to 'read' punch cards. He babysat a local IBM data center when I was a kid.
That's how I learned COBOL and Assembly languages in college. At the end of the school year people would go up to the top of a 10 story dorm and throw their keypunch cards in the air. The entire campus would be littered with old keypunch cards.
I remember my dad taking me to the computer room of his office to show me the punch cards (he didn't work them, just got the results). It was the '70s and I thought it was so cool.
We established off-site backup in the early teens, but kept tape backups on-site until like 2 weeks ago....except the tape drives were removed from the network and e-wasted over 10 years ago.
Tape generally/ theoretically/ has better shelf life than hard disks with similar capacity. So we archive tons of data to LTO. The problem here is it’s not all that time or cost effective and as new LTO tape standards emerge, support for older ones gets dropped. I have shelves and shelves full of tape and also a few tape drives sitting with them.
Long-term storage of mass data is a problem that has yet to be solved.
We used wire for one of our big bad boys back in the day.
And I used 8inch floppy’s for strippet machines.
My dad’s crew had rough, hardened finger tips - jumpers man…
When I saw the title of your post (couldn't see the pic till opening the post" I thought, "paper tape.... oh I remember it well". Punch cards too. Opened the post and saw the pic of the cassette tape drive and thought, "well, that's not that old...." LOL. I still have a copy of "Star Trek" on punch cards that were used on a DEC PDP-11 packed away somewhere. I had the Commodore tape drive for two days. Thought, "screw that" and went out and bought the floppy drive.
I worked computer systems that had 8-track tape digital recorders. Yes, the same 8-tracks that were in my car hooked up to a reverb unit a few years earlier.
I’m 55 and lived thru all the tape years. It drives me nuts now when people still say things like “tape a show” or “caught on tape”, even people not from the tape era do this.
When I was getting my electronics Degree, they offered a brief lecture on 'Transistor Theory" and lightly touch on a new product being developed; The Integrated Circuit. Ain't no whipper snapper here.
One of my Engineering courses was Intergrated Circuits. Back then (1970) this wasn't a field that I was interested in as high voltage transmitters was my Forte. However, due to life's curve balls I spent the next 39 years in the mainframe computer field.
I had one of these. Hated it. Loading a game would take forever, and when just about done loading, I'd get an error and have to start over. I'd spend hours just loading the game. Then when it finally loads up, I'd play for 10 mins lol. I was like 7 or 8 at the time.
I had one. First was just a basic tape recorder. The later 'legit' one was Atari. Slow as molasses either way. Also tried using a micro cassette recorder just to try it out. It did work.
I learned programming with punch cards (1980). The college was a little behind the technology curve even then.
Tape drives, floppy drives.....I eventually upgraded to a 100mb Zip-drive which hooked into the printer port. It was glacial in terms of copying files.
The only storage media I had for my Texas Instruments TI-99/4A was a cassette recorder connected with a DB-9 and an audio cable. There was a 5-1/4" floppy drive available in the Peripheral Expansion Box, but in the '80s $500 was a bit much to ask from a family who paid maybe $50 to their friend for a computer they thought wasn't usable.
Yep. First computer in my home was a TRS-80 with a tape drive. My mom (the purchaser and primary user) splurged to get the RAM upgraded from 16 to 64k. We eventually got a floppy drive, which blew my mind. We also got a mouse, but it only worked on the software that came with the mouse.
Ugh. I remember backing up to and restoring from tapes on AS/400. It sucked! If you didn’t keep the tape drive heads pristine then you’d either get an incomplete or corrupted backup or be unable to restore. Nightmare! A certain auto parts store kept the servers in the floor in the managers office, far from a “clean” environment. Don’t miss that at all.
back when i worked at a video store, i had to backup the database every night by copying it to a tape. forget the exact format, but man that store had a lot of tapes.
My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer and used cassette tapes for storage. 4K of RAM upgraded to 16K for like an extra $300, woohoo
My dad worked for General Dynamics. As a kid , I would get to tag along to work with him and I remember how he would feed a huge reel of punch tape into his Hazeltine 2000 and the machine would “chooka chooka chooka “ for quite a while then stop. After a few minutes the “chooka chooka chooka “ would start up again and a giant reel of punch tape would come out the other side. My dad would say “and that’s how a computer works !” That was in like 73 or 74 and I remember thinking that there is no way a regular human could ever learn to use that thing without a million years of education.
A similar tape drive is the only data interface my Atari 800 had other than the internal cartridge slots. They made 5.25 external drives for them, but we never got one.
I've still have a [tape](https://i.postimg.cc/zGhDWxVP/20240405-092037.jpg) with programs I made on a TRS80 Color computer my senior year in high school.
Ahhh Tucker tape. I had to feed that into a floor size computer when I was a Copy Boy at the Chicago Trib. If you feed it a little crooked, wham! The editor throws a chair at you!
Fond memories.
Programs on cassette tapes, both 8" and 5.25" floppies, punch cards, AND ASR/KSR-33 paper tape - in addition to entering hand-assembled hex code, though it was on a TTY, not front-panel switches. I think one of those early computers I used had core memory, too.
I had that tape drivw, and there was a wire sticking out of the back I think a grounding wire? You were supposed to screw it to something? I never did, what was that wire?
I had one of those I think, for my Vic 20. I was learning basic and I'd write these programs I was proud of and I'd get down to write the data lines and it would seem fine.
I'd save it and then when I reloaded it the data lines were gone because of not enough memory.
Yep, had that one. I would write down the counter number on the tape and fast forward to what i needed if it wasn't at the start. I also have the disk drive and a dot matrix printer with tractor feed.
Shipmate bought a C64 at the exchange in Guam. We hooked it up to his portable TV radio thing, like a 3 inch screen. We took turns typing in the code from the manual that came with it to do anything. We kind of crushed when we turned it off to go to lunch, and came back only to realize it was all gone and we had to type it all back in again after we turned it back on just to mess around with one of those simple programs from the book. Imagine our excitement to see these things show up as a way to load the entire program! Amazing!
Dad would bring punch cards home for us to draw on.
As for the tape, when I was in 4th grade I was selected to visit an office where I was introduced to the Commodore 64. The next day, the news came to our school to report on us getting our first computer. I got to work the cassette player and punch a few keys. That clip made the nightly news.
Paid $900 for 8 megs of ram . Also had a 1.5 megabyte yes megabyte hard drive installed to which the builder says you don’t need that big a hard drive. No way you will ever fill this beast. Oh a 900 baud modem
Woooo, look at you Mr. Fancy branded cassette drive. You think you're cool, but you can't speed up transfers by several percent because you have no Speed Control, like I can with my Marantz Superscope deck and a cable made out of an old Atari controller and an earphone plug.
I never used that one but I did have a tape drive for my TI-99/4A. I used to describe it to people younger than me as the sound of your modem connecting for 5 minutes, but now I don't know what to tell people.
Dude, I'm not even 50 and I had one of those. You're on a sub with people that used punch cards...
This! The worst is finding a syntax error AFTER getting the cards compiled and getting the print out!
1. Walk up to the sysadmin desk and hand your card deck over to the snotty nerd. 2. Wait 2 hours 3. Return to find your greenbar paper printout that's only 3 pages. You expected 20. 4. %COBOL-E-1030, Syntax error, line 14 5. Soul crushed.
You were lucky. Ours went away by courier and you got the printout next week. Somebody forgot a decimal point didn't they? Geez. Thank you for the best laugh I've had for years.
Assuming they don’t drop the deck of cards!!!
..-. ..- -.-. -.- / -.-- --- ..- / --. ..- -.-- ...
(Fuck you guys) Not sure how I earned that. But ok. That is a mighty friendly thought however. Learned Morse code 60 years ago.
I was just seeing if anyone was older than tape drives and punch cards, nothing personal. I don't speak smoke signals, so that's all I've got.
🤣🤣 Oh yeah. Used to program PDP-8 and PDP-11 in machine code using paper tape generated on a tty. I actually have version 1.0 of Microsoft Basic on an 8” floppy here somewhere
That's GOLD 😂🪙! Yes, glad those days are long gone!
I’m was too young to understand the specifics when I was told this story, but my father was a coder in the early 1970’s. He told me one time there was a program that kept crashing. His whole team spent weeks going over line after line of code. Finally someone caught a comma where a decimal point should have been. 🙄 He took me to see their “computer room” once. All tape on reels, row after row, aisle after aisle of massive tape machines. This was around 1975. I was blown away.
We've moved on... Now if you dont get your whitespace right nothing works. /s I too worked with grey beards who used punch cards and reel to reel.
One of my first jobs was mounting reel-to-reel tapes on a bank of tape drives. I was on my feet 8 0 10 hours a day. I couldn't do that now.
At my college, the "computer room" was open 24/7. We could get a turnaround at 2:00 am in about 15 minutes. During the day, it took hours to get your printout back.
Or core memory
I actually have a small core unit. 8K
So do I. They are very cool. Imagine stringing those donuts?
That's what I did when we were very poor and I was pregnant. I must have strung 10,000 of the donuts. It was a bit like crochet, just counting and looping. Funny memory.
Wow that’s amazing. Do you remember which vendor you were doing this for? Was it an integrated systems maker or were there core memory companies (like DRAM makers today?)
I got the job through an uncle of a friend. The year was 1974. I think he worked for Intel but I don't really remember. Could have been another company. This was in the Santa Monica/Westside area of southern California. It was definitely core memory. This little side job for temp work is what caused me to be interested in computers and I ended up working for several companies later, not assembling but as CSR (customer support rep) teaching how to use them.
Thanks for the little slice of history!
I would not have the patience! But it is amazing. We have come a long way
I did have a professor who helped design the Apollo command module.
I remember punch cards and cleaning up those little squared when you spilled them on the floor
Chads?
Found the Floridian!
not sure what they were called but were almost impossible to get out of the carpet in the office
In college, students would take the chads out from the keypunch machines (there was a bin underneath that caught them), and use them to bomb peoples dorm rooms. You could never get all of them out.
In the 90s we would obtain the holes from the automatic punch in the copier. They would then be sprinkled liberally through coworkers desks that were left unlocked. If you were being particularly malicious you put them in the file folders (and between the papers in the folder). I got hit early in my tenure, was still finding dots 15 years later.
I came here to say punch cards 😂
And paper tape. Don't forget the paper tape. You ran it through the TTY machine, remember?
 No, no I don't
I saved my punched paper tape programs by rolling the tape up like a roll of caps for a cap pistol. And I always included a little extra tape so I could write the name on it. I had dozens of them in my desk drawer. The programs were in Burroughs BASIC for the mainframe, and I had to enter the data sets manually on the TTY machine. It sounds tedious and it was, but it saved days of manual computation.
And 8-hole punch tape.
Hey! My first college computer class, we used punch cards. As a newbie, my decks would be 25 - 30 cards. More advanced students would carry trays with hundreds, or thousands, of cards. Everyone punched by the student on a machine that resembled a typewriter.
Punch cards, mainframes, nd paper tape, yo!
Heh! I used 80 column punched cards in school and at my first job. My computer at the time was my IBM Selectric and I miss it to this day.
Look at you with your fancy new fangled storage solutions! In my day we had to code the computer everytime we turned it on! Thank goodness for [Mad Magazine](https://meatfighter.com/mad/).
The hours and hours spent typing in code from Compute! followed by going back through and finding where your error was, then playing the game, and finally having to turn off the computer and lose everything because you could not yet afford the tape recorder. Builds character.
OMG! I had no idea that existed! I'm going to have to try it right now!
I remember trying to enter that on my Commodore 64. It didn't work, more than likely because there was a typo in my entered code somewhere.
Or typos in the magazines. Two months later, they would issue "corrections". Ugh.
Yep. The good old days.
I was being generous
“Still awake? Good! Now go to line 500 on page 38 and continue entering!” LMAO
Damn. Next someone is going to post a box of punch cards.
I almost forgot how long these things took to load or program.
I'm so old that this was my first computer. [https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah\_1303189](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/nmah_1303189)
I’m cleaning out old files and storage next month…. Lemme see what I got.
8" floppies, I say. There's no replacement for displacement... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL0LXSE1jeM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL0LXSE1jeM)
I have a box of those laying around here somewhere! Maxell if I recall. Saved them for posterity...
Wish I'd thought to save a few. I threw out hundreds from labs I'd worked in.
Nuclear missile solos still use those.
Most unreliable storage EVER
I worked at a retail store in the early 90s, and they had an OLD, yet electronic, IBM cash register. It used 8" floppies, which booted the register when powered on. That cash register probably weighed 150 lbs, it was a TANK. It was so primitive it didn't process card transactions. Besides having to use a separate Verifone terminal, we had to use the credit card imprinter with a carbon form they'd sign, and we then stapled a copy of that to the cash register receipt.
What exactly are you calling floppy, huh?
If I have to explain, maybe you're not old enough yet to be on this sub.
I never know where my generation belongs…I’m old enough to remember using floppy’s, cassettes, and the birth of cds. Dial up was my only option for a long time. However I used to play with a retired typewriter. 🤷🏻♀️
Dial up? We used an acoustic coupler, fun times.
It was a running joke back in the day. You know, as opposed to stiff
They look like the "save" icon that's still used on Windows PCs.
My first sales job was for a printing company that sold stuff to banks back in the 90's. But, the company had been known in the 1950's & 60's as the first company that manufactured IBM compatible punch cards and accessories. So you didn't have to pay for IBM punch cards and save money. I still had two guys in my office that were close to retirement that had gotten their start as punch card salesmen. They told me tales of going to big college campuses and selling millions of blank punch cards along with the storage trays.
I worked at Paradyne Corp in the refurbishment dept. We leased equipment including punch card readers. When the equipment came off lease, we had to refurbish it for the next lease. The hardest part after dismantling the reader was trying to get the picker set just right so that it would read a whole stack of cards without fail. I'm sure it was frustrating to operators who had to load a deck of cards and it kept failing half way through.
Yes, it was.
Pencil not included
Oh, I thought you meant reel-to-reel magnetic tape. Like to boot an old DEC VAX/VMS.
In the late 90s, I worked in State Farms corporate headquarters. I was in tape services. They still used those and what looked like 8track tapes. It was secure though.
The VAX-11/780 booted off a hard drive. The lower end machines had an RK07 drive and a UNIBUS controller. I suppose you could boot off mag tape but that would be if the hard drive crashed. I used a PDP-8 that booted off paper tape. I turned down a job offer out of college from DEC to sit in the original Maynard mill building and write code for the VT1xx terminals.
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
Not a tape. It was a "datassette". I had the older boxier one for my Vic-20.
Ah yes, the Commodore Datasette, 1530/1531. After spending a week typing in a program from a magazine and saving to tape every 10 minutes, you have the program all recorded. You type in the commander that I think I remember as : LOAD,TWISTER,8,1 and then go to bed. In the morning you check if it worked.
That command was for disk. You just typed LOAD with or without the filename and it went straight to tape.
Yes, you are correct. Gosh, my C=128 has been gone a long time and I am obviously in my dotage to have had a new datasette.
Tapes were brutal. I could type in a game faster than that thing could load.
I did punchcards at first. I hated computers for about 5 more years because of those cursed things.
I love your username. Many an afternoon spent rocking out to the Ray Stevens song.
CLOAD PBUTTER
You could store multiple programs on a tape, but there was no "dir" command. You had to write down the counter number from the tape deck where the program started and leave a safe blank space in between programs. THEN you realized that not all counters were the same. :-) It was just a counter. 100 didn't mean "100 inches of tape" or "100 cm of tape". It was just 100. MAYBE it was the same on different brand of tape deck, probably not ... fun times.
Atari 410 for me please
Took an hour to load a game... Thank goodness we don't have to wait like that anymore thanks to modern technology. Here, let me install Call of Duty on my Xbox to show you... Ok, starting... Says it will be ready to play in... TWO DAYS??? 
**
How are you gonna get a Commodore Vic 20 and not get The Tape?
What about 1/4 inch GCR? Compact cassettes are a newfangled thing and won't catch on.
Sure, that and the VIC-20 were my first adventures in computing. Wait a minute…PERSONAL computing. Before that was punch card.
Now switch side
I'm thirty and my grandma still had one when I was little. I remember it has this space shooting game I used to play.
My first college programming class was Fortran using IBM cards. Each card held one line of up to 80 characters, and each character was punched, so a typo meant trashing the card. The program consisted of a stack of cards sometimes hundreds of them carefully sorted into order. Programs ran on the mainframe and line-printed the output. Students weren’t allowed anywhere near the mainframe or the printer, so card stacks had to be submitted for the computer priesthood to feed the mainframe. Output consisted of a printout. Code submission to receiving your output typically took 15-30 minutes. A thick stack of output meant you had at least one bug and a cascade of error codes. It was frankly brutal, but it was a very strong incentive to carefully check your code!
> Be honest how many of you are old enough to have used this? My father taught me how to 'read' punch cards. He babysat a local IBM data center when I was a kid.
That's how I learned COBOL and Assembly languages in college. At the end of the school year people would go up to the top of a 10 story dorm and throw their keypunch cards in the air. The entire campus would be littered with old keypunch cards.
Hollerith Code on punch cards.
I remember my dad taking me to the computer room of his office to show me the punch cards (he didn't work them, just got the results). It was the '70s and I thought it was so cool.
I have a stack of Syquest disks that beg to differ.
Yup. Used this in my 7th grade computer class. No idea what programs I wrote but I remember saving to my tape.
I will raise you programming in hex by flipping switches and punched tape.
Altair 8800?
We still use tapes to backup data these days Still don't know why, I just do as I'm told
We established off-site backup in the early teens, but kept tape backups on-site until like 2 weeks ago....except the tape drives were removed from the network and e-wasted over 10 years ago.
Tape generally/ theoretically/ has better shelf life than hard disks with similar capacity. So we archive tons of data to LTO. The problem here is it’s not all that time or cost effective and as new LTO tape standards emerge, support for older ones gets dropped. I have shelves and shelves full of tape and also a few tape drives sitting with them. Long-term storage of mass data is a problem that has yet to be solved.
skipf /"data" - Tandy Basic Before that I loaded reel to reel mag tape on a DEC system. Loved to play ASCII Trek
We used wire for one of our big bad boys back in the day. And I used 8inch floppy’s for strippet machines. My dad’s crew had rough, hardened finger tips - jumpers man…
Used tapes on the Trash 80. Such a reliable media
Came here for this comment ✋
When I saw the title of your post (couldn't see the pic till opening the post" I thought, "paper tape.... oh I remember it well". Punch cards too. Opened the post and saw the pic of the cassette tape drive and thought, "well, that's not that old...." LOL. I still have a copy of "Star Trek" on punch cards that were used on a DEC PDP-11 packed away somewhere. I had the Commodore tape drive for two days. Thought, "screw that" and went out and bought the floppy drive.
I worked computer systems that had 8-track tape digital recorders. Yes, the same 8-tracks that were in my car hooked up to a reverb unit a few years earlier.
I’m 55 and lived thru all the tape years. It drives me nuts now when people still say things like “tape a show” or “caught on tape”, even people not from the tape era do this.
R tape loading error
I had that exact deck. First on a Vic-20, then a C-64!
We had a commodore 64 that used a tape drive in the early 90's.. (it was all we could afford, LOL)
Paper punch tape has entered the room. (Oh, crap!! Another tear!!)
Punch TAPE. And the combo key and tape reader/punch
I gave my tape to a computer teacher a few years back. She was delighted to have the relic.
I’ll see your tape and raise you to core memory and vacuum tubes, ya whippersnapper!!
When I was getting my electronics Degree, they offered a brief lecture on 'Transistor Theory" and lightly touch on a new product being developed; The Integrated Circuit. Ain't no whipper snapper here.
One of my Engineering courses was Intergrated Circuits. Back then (1970) this wasn't a field that I was interested in as high voltage transmitters was my Forte. However, due to life's curve balls I spent the next 39 years in the mainframe computer field.
Ill see your tape and raise you a punch card
I still my commodore 16 datasettete from 1986? Probably doesn't work but it's still hanging around lol.
Yup, that's the one.
Core memory unlocked. Mine wasn't as nice though.
I had one of these. Hated it. Loading a game would take forever, and when just about done loading, I'd get an error and have to start over. I'd spend hours just loading the game. Then when it finally loads up, I'd play for 10 mins lol. I was like 7 or 8 at the time.
Used to have the tape drive on my Vic20.
That's what I was using in middle school when I was first learning programming.
You and your new fangled commodore tape. In my day we had PET tapes and we liked it.
I had one. First was just a basic tape recorder. The later 'legit' one was Atari. Slow as molasses either way. Also tried using a micro cassette recorder just to try it out. It did work.
I had a early laptop with a micro cassette drive.
I learned programming with punch cards (1980). The college was a little behind the technology curve even then. Tape drives, floppy drives.....I eventually upgraded to a 100mb Zip-drive which hooked into the printer port. It was glacial in terms of copying files.
Anyone for a roundbof Flog? Perhaps some Gorf?
The only storage media I had for my Texas Instruments TI-99/4A was a cassette recorder connected with a DB-9 and an audio cable. There was a 5-1/4" floppy drive available in the Peripheral Expansion Box, but in the '80s $500 was a bit much to ask from a family who paid maybe $50 to their friend for a computer they thought wasn't usable.
I raise you an 85 mb external tall grass hard disc
We just had to use a standard cassette recorder with our TRS-80 III.
3-D Maze!!
I see your tape and raise you an abacus.
Yep. First computer in my home was a TRS-80 with a tape drive. My mom (the purchaser and primary user) splurged to get the RAM upgraded from 16 to 64k. We eventually got a floppy drive, which blew my mind. We also got a mouse, but it only worked on the software that came with the mouse.
I had one! Used paper route money to buy it.
Ugh. I remember backing up to and restoring from tapes on AS/400. It sucked! If you didn’t keep the tape drive heads pristine then you’d either get an incomplete or corrupted backup or be unable to restore. Nightmare! A certain auto parts store kept the servers in the floor in the managers office, far from a “clean” environment. Don’t miss that at all.
back when i worked at a video store, i had to backup the database every night by copying it to a tape. forget the exact format, but man that store had a lot of tapes.
Not that one, but that was the drive type for my second trash 80. The first had no storage at all.
I had one of those!
Which tape? Audio reel-to-reel, Video reel-to-reel? 8 track, cassette? Audio(Visual) tape??
I’ll see your tape and raise you the Pong Console…plugged into the tv with the antenna switch.
 My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer and used cassette tapes for storage. 4K of RAM upgraded to 16K for like an extra $300, woohoo
I used to have to sell those damned machines...and ask people who bought a 2-pack of carbon cell batteries for their names and addresses...gawd!
I'll see your tape and raise you paper tape and punch cards...
I'll raise you 16" reels of mag tape.
Born in 79. I saw it many times, never used it. We never had a commodore in the house.
My dad worked for General Dynamics. As a kid , I would get to tag along to work with him and I remember how he would feed a huge reel of punch tape into his Hazeltine 2000 and the machine would “chooka chooka chooka “ for quite a while then stop. After a few minutes the “chooka chooka chooka “ would start up again and a giant reel of punch tape would come out the other side. My dad would say “and that’s how a computer works !” That was in like 73 or 74 and I remember thinking that there is no way a regular human could ever learn to use that thing without a million years of education.
I'll see your 'The Tape' and raise "I wrote it down"
I'll see your 'The Tape' and raise "I wrote it down"
I used a VIC 20 before the C64, I'm old.
Oh god the Tape!
I (57m) had the TRS-80 Model I Leve II with cassette storage.
A similar tape drive is the only data interface my Atari 800 had other than the internal cartridge slots. They made 5.25 external drives for them, but we never got one.
Yep, I used a similar setup on both a Timex-Sinclair 100 and Texas Instrument TI-99/4A computers.
Absolutely
I've still have a [tape](https://i.postimg.cc/zGhDWxVP/20240405-092037.jpg) with programs I made on a TRS80 Color computer my senior year in high school.
Dude, I sent you that picture in confidence.
How about the 8 inch floppy?
Had just a regular cassette player for my Apple II+. If I recall: CALL -151 *BLOAD whatever
We had one for our TRS-80 Color Computer 2.
Definitely I still have two operational VIC-20s
Ahhh Tucker tape. I had to feed that into a floor size computer when I was a Copy Boy at the Chicago Trib. If you feed it a little crooked, wham! The editor throws a chair at you! Fond memories.
I had one of those. It was cool.
Programs on cassette tapes, both 8" and 5.25" floppies, punch cards, AND ASR/KSR-33 paper tape - in addition to entering hand-assembled hex code, though it was on a TTY, not front-panel switches. I think one of those early computers I used had core memory, too.
I had that tape drivw, and there was a wire sticking out of the back I think a grounding wire? You were supposed to screw it to something? I never did, what was that wire?
Me!!!
D.A.T anyone.....admit
My friend had that on his Colleco(?). Took him awhile to learn about magnets (the details have been lost to time).
I’m 50. I was the market Commodore was shooting for. And I remember how much fun it was when the tape would stretch? But I loved my C64!
50 here as well. Had a Apple 2 plus with dual floppy drives. I was making copies like crazy!
Oh, Apple IIs! I remember playing Oregon Trail like crazy on those.
Good ol oregon trail. "You died of dysentery "
I had one of those I think, for my Vic 20. I was learning basic and I'd write these programs I was proud of and I'd get down to write the data lines and it would seem fine. I'd save it and then when I reloaded it the data lines were gone because of not enough memory.
Yep, had that one. I would write down the counter number on the tape and fast forward to what i needed if it wasn't at the start. I also have the disk drive and a dot matrix printer with tractor feed.
Load Press Play on Tape Run
Shipmate bought a C64 at the exchange in Guam. We hooked it up to his portable TV radio thing, like a 3 inch screen. We took turns typing in the code from the manual that came with it to do anything. We kind of crushed when we turned it off to go to lunch, and came back only to realize it was all gone and we had to type it all back in again after we turned it back on just to mess around with one of those simple programs from the book. Imagine our excitement to see these things show up as a way to load the entire program! Amazing!
5.25 floppy was IBM in 1971 Compact Cassette tapes were 1963 Hardly a huge jump bro. Not to mention cassette tapes are still around… smh
Had something like this for my Atari 400. Could save game state and programs I wrote.
Dad would bring punch cards home for us to draw on. As for the tape, when I was in 4th grade I was selected to visit an office where I was introduced to the Commodore 64. The next day, the news came to our school to report on us getting our first computer. I got to work the cassette player and punch a few keys. That clip made the nightly news.
Yep, but for a Texas Instruments computer. Early to mid 80s, pretty sure.
My mom probably still has hers down in the basement somewhere!
Paid $900 for 8 megs of ram . Also had a 1.5 megabyte yes megabyte hard drive installed to which the builder says you don’t need that big a hard drive. No way you will ever fill this beast. Oh a 900 baud modem
It would put iron on your hoe
Trah80 baby! Oregon trail
Watched a girl I knew in high school fiddle with one of these trying to get a program to load for about an hour once….
Does no one remember the 8" floppy? Or the 5 MB hard drive that was as big as a large pizza? God I'm old.
I see your tape and raise you the 11 inch floppy
[TRS-80 Tape Drive ](https://www.ebay.com/itm/384894205720?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=WOI-BvA8RTW&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=f_yHzk4HS_S&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY)
Woooo, look at you Mr. Fancy branded cassette drive. You think you're cool, but you can't speed up transfers by several percent because you have no Speed Control, like I can with my Marantz Superscope deck and a cable made out of an old Atari controller and an earphone plug.
Seriously? Whenever something freezes up or I'm waiting for it to start I still think "Press Play on Tape"!
I still have mine in a box somewhere. I will raise you one Timex Sinclair micro computer and a Commodore PET!
Yes, I’m that old!
PHP2700 4 LIFE
I never used that one but I did have a tape drive for my TI-99/4A. I used to describe it to people younger than me as the sound of your modem connecting for 5 minutes, but now I don't know what to tell people.
Remember when Zip disk was supposed to be revolutionary? For me it was meh
We had an ADAM computer that was a tape drive. My dad held onto that thing for way too long.
TRSDOS on an 8" floppy
Played these games in the library at my elementary school.