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.

[beccabear67]

I used to love cassettes for music, I remember local area artistes would put their own music out on that format although to me nothing seemed more real than black vinyl and we did have one group put out a 7" single via a record shop (which I still have). I also did buy pre-recorded cassette releases for albums at a certain point, but while you could make a cassette from a vinyl album you could not make a vinyl album from the cassette!

As for data...

[beccabear67]

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.

I remember cassettes for desktop computers before I saw any disc drives... I never thought to see if there'd be any sound on an audio player from one of those data cassettes.

[Arran]

There must have been cassette tapes manufactured specifically for the distribution of computer games that were about 10 minutes long. Any ideas if the tape stock was the same for standard audio cassettes or was it higher grade?

I have seen some 'flippy' cassette tapes that have the game for one computer on the A side and the game for a different computer on the B side. A clever idea to save on shelf space in shops.

[George 1978]

I remember cassettes for desktop computers before I saw any disc drives... I never thought to see if there'd be any sound on an audio player from one of those data cassettes.

I played one of them on a hi-fi at home, and all I heard was a strange sounding tone going up and down, and something which was not much interest to an average listener of a cassette tape - something more suited to an average 1980s BBC computer.

[Arran]

I think there must have been plenty of kids who tried playing a computer game cassette in a stereo out of curiosity back in the 1980s. It sounded vaguely similar to when you dialled the fax number instead of the phone number.