
Apple2e-audio-transport: transmit binary to Apple II by sound - luu
https://github.com/hausdorff/apple2e-audio-transport
======
lutusp
It may surprise younger technologists to learn that an entire generation of
personal computers used ordinary audio equipment for storage. A cassette
recorder would be used to read and write digital data, and one's archive of
mass storage consisted of a pile of cassette tapes.

Among the downsides (there were many) was the fact that a huge amount of time
was required to read and write a few tens of kilobytes of data.

I can remember begging Steve Jobs to relent and give me one of the new, rather
expensive disk drives under development at Apple, so my work on Apple Writer
would be sped up by perhaps ten times compared to the older storage methods.

In this image of my system from about 1979 --

[http://i.imgur.com/CjoRH.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/CjoRH.jpg)

\-- one can see two of the new storage devices -- floppy disk drives sitting
on my Apple II -- and their immediate predecessor located at left center, a
cassette recorder/player as a backup. Each floppy disk was able to contain 140
kilobytes of data. The new drives constituted a breakthrough in storage
density and read/write time -- about five minutes to read or write a full disk
of data.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_II](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_II)

One of these drives and its controller card cost US$595.00 in 1978, equivalent
to $2130.00 in today's dollars.

~~~
nsxwolf
I've seen a couple projects like this in the last couple years and it always
seems like the programmers involved don't realize that they're using a
cassette interface, that they've discovered some bizarre hack on the Apple II.
I'm guessing these people are pretty young.

