Death of the cassette

[Arran]

Has anybody experienced software on cassette tapes on computers at school - and having to wait for it to load? The BBC B / Master has a cassette interface port. I'm sure that plenty of schools in the 1980s didn't have (or couldn't afford?!) floppy drives for their computers.

Does loading software from cassette tapes feature in any old episodes of Grange Hill? How about playing a computer cassette in a stereo with all the weird screeching sounds?

I'm from the hard drive and Encarta on CD ROM era.

[Richard1978]

Has anybody experienced software on cassette tapes on computers at school - and having to wait for it to load? The BBC B / Master has a cassette interface port. I'm sure that plenty of schools in the 1980s didn't have (or couldn't afford?!) floppy drives for their computers.

Does loading software from cassette tapes feature in any old episodes of Grange Hill? How about playing a computer cassette in a stereo with all the weird screeching sounds?

I'm from the hard drive and Encarta on CD ROM era.

I had an Acorn Electron with all the software on tape. Occasionally the tape needed positioning to a particular place, & the data recorder had a feature where the speaker could be used to listen to the tape to help things. It was a screechy sound, but not too bad when you fast forwarded or rewound it!

[George 1978]

In the mid 1980s there were some special cassette tapes for computers which were around ten minutes long on each side just for using them on those machines - my sister did comuter studies at the time and I remember her bringing one home with her, probably as a form of homework.