T&L Publications

Is there any way to put serial data onto a tape? I thought it would be neat to store data onto cheap tapes. Is it possible? <p>[ December 26, 2001: Message edited by: tad heckaman ]</p>

Try some Internet research of the old "Kansas City Standard", a popular method of storing data on standard audio cassettes during the heyday of Altair, IMSAI, Processor Technology, etc. of the mid-1970's. Seems to me that there were some construction articles in the early days of Byte magazine (before the McGraw-Hill days) and Wayne Green's Kilobaud magazine, a periodical that unfortunately lasted maybe a year. Also unfortunately, I gave away all my Byte magazines to a clown who subsequently threw them all away, including the very early issues that are probably worth some nice coin today. And my Kilobaud issues are where I can't get to them to check the validity of my suggestion.

Audio tape will limit the baud rate to something like 150 baud, SLOW. Video tape is a better choice, you could use FM modulation into the video port and have megabytes of storage at a reasonable rate. The video recorder should be good to 5 or6 mHz.

thanks. I look on the internet with the Kansas City Standard and I found a lot of info on it. I alos found a program that will let me do it on a Dos computer useing the sound card. Thanks for all the help and I will try to see if I can et it to work on a Basic Stamp

Back in the early days of home computing, this is how the Commodore VIC-20 stored its programs. I suspect that there are plenty of the old datasettes laying around (I have two myself).