Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Gizmodo has a story about a tape drive unit for your desktop PC. It’s basically a way to directly interface with the music on a cassette tape so that you can digitize it. It’s a nice idea for those who have piles of old tapes they no longer use, or want to import into their MP3 player, but I just wonder how good the quality is going to be from a 20-year-old tape that’s been played 100 or so times. What is probably a question I hear more often is how to get old vinyl digitized. Many more records were put on vinyl - maybe for 90 years or more? - before CD’s subsumed them. Cassette tapes were only being sold I think from the early 70’s, or perhaps late 60’s, although their sales were not as aclipsed as quickly by CD’s. I just thought it was funny that they were “bringing back” a casette tape player into a computer system! I remember for my first computer, a TRS-80 back in the late 70’s, it came with a tape player which acted as a drive that you could load programs to, or I suppose save them to as well. Of course, it was not random access like a CD or even a floppy disk, but it had to go through the entire tape to find the program. I’m not sure how much a single tape held, but it was less than an old floppy, so probably 100K or maybe less? And of course it was SLOW. Just to load a program off a tape was a very long process. My god, how far we’ve come in 25 years, it’s amazing! I think of kids these days hopping on computers and how easy and fast they are compared to that time. I suppose, though, this is how it’s been even before that (although they didn’t even have home computers, it was more ham radios or electronics kits), and how it will be in the future. Maybe my grandchildren will be playing with their own personal AI’s, or downloading/uploading info to/from their brains. Ah well, they will never know the joy of watching that casette tape play and play and play in order to load some probably completely useless program that would let you display blocky pictures or calculate some basic equation…