Computer gold from a musical mix tape

[YoshiM]

Recently I decided to go digging through a box of audio tapes to see what kind of mix tapes I had from my distant past. Like most folks that threw together tapes, few of my tapes were labeled save for ones that had whole albums (like I found a tape of Dweezil Zappa on one side with Toad the Wet Sprocket on the other). My 2004 SUV, which sucks gas like teenagers used to guzzle Mountain Dew, has a saving grace of having a stock CD and tape player, so I popped a cassette in and listen to what I recorded on my way to work.

The tape was almost done on the side I started, providing me with what sounded like the last few songs on Dave Matthews Band's album "Under the Table and Dreaming". The tape flipped itself and there was silence. Then some noise. Then.....a squelching noise that instantly transported me back to my computer roots. A Tandy Color Computer program graced the speakers of my vehicle and I listened in anticipation to see if the program would complete or if the code was cut off by the warbled croon of Dave Matthews. In moments the program finished and I was literally ecstatic! Another program started but was much shorter. Then music started. I yanked the tape out of the deck and stored it in my console until I could extract the data.

That night when I got home I dug out an old tape recorder and plugged the audio into my tower computer, which is home to my emulators. After much fiddling and re-recording I was able to finally get one emulator, MESS, to load the WAV file. Will it be some old document my Dad put wrote or perhaps a long lost program either of us typed in or built ourselves in BASIC? The CLOAD screen flashed from "S" for searching to "F" to found and my question was answered. What loaded (though to an FM ERROR as it was a machine language program) was the text adventure game "Pyramid". It was a little disappointing it wasn't something more personal but it was a neat find nonetheless. I could not, unfortunately, get the other program to load. I still can't figure out why I left the programs intact and hadn't just recorded from the beginning. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps the music on the other side ended before the tape did and I just flipped the tape to continue recording.

Still, it was a fun trip down memory lane on two counts. I went back to a time where one had to have patience to 1)make a mix tape (as opposed to burning MP3s to a CD or even just coming up with a streaming song list) and 2)to wait minutes for a game that was only a few KB's in size.

[Niku-Sama]

thats one thing i'm surprised i've never come across with all the crap i accumulate i've never found any ones programs stored on cassette.

that is pretty neat

[Greg2600]

Neat story. Occasionally I've gotten a kick out of listen to crazy stuff we recorded on tape with a mic as kids, or venturing through boxes of old diskettes or zip disks. Storing on cassette was something that I or those around me never did. The cassette for computer really never got rolling here.

[YoshiM]

Cassette storage was all we had from about 1981ish until probably around 1986 or 1987 when my Dad bought a floppy drive and a CoCo 2 after roasting his 16K CoCo 1 trying to upgrade the RAM. It was definitely a lesson in patience as a child. I remember one instance where my Dad typed in a program that was multiple files long that loaded individual drawings of the Earth as a globe. After something like a half hour or so, all the images were loaded and a smooth spinning globe appeared on the screen.

Somewhere between 2000 and 2004 when I had a 5 1/4" floppy drive on my tower PC that could actually read CoCo disks, I backed up a lot of my stuff to DSK format using Jeff Vavasour's Tandy CoCo DOS programs. As for cassette stuff, I still had a CoCo at the time and I loaded programs from tape and saved the to disk. Then I imaged the disks.

Over the years I found I still had a couple of tapes after my hardware sell-offs: my 1984 Christmas tape my Dad gave me and one that says "Telewriter 64", which is the word processor my Dad used to write his never-finished novels. I did go through my Christmas tape and found a bunch of stuff I wrote both on CoCo and on TI-99 4A (ie REALLY bad text adventures-though I didn't find a cool Ghostbusters game I wrote in BASIC for the TI. That actually turned out OK).