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Tape recorders (Page 2)

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Audio tapes were primary program and data storage in 8-bit microcomputers. They were cheap, easy to get and offered small, but enough amount of space. Unfortunately they were slow and quite unreliable, so commercial software was recorded few times on the same tape. Many computers, such as ZX Spectrum, Meritum or MSX used an ordinary tape recorder, like the one used in audio recording. But some computers used dedicated hardware with serial interface, for example 8-bit Atari computers or Commodore machines. Fortunately, most of these computers were quite easy to modify, so normal decks could be used.
Another group of decks were normal ones, but with special circuits making working with microcomputers easier. These included frequency filters, self-setting of optimal volume or small speakers allowing to find place on tape without waking up everyone in house. Nearly all recorders had counter, which allows to fast rewind to known program location (unfortunately their results sre usually different in different units) and a hole near read/write head to tune head skew, if it was needed.

As tapes were slow, some decks were re-made to load programs faster. In Commodore computers, Turbo-Tape modification required only a software program, but in Atari 8-bit computers it was needed to put some electronics in tape recorder and load software from cartridge. If there was no software, recorded tape became unreadable. If there was no hardware - the computer could not read program or hanged during loading every time.

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