before [Woz] produced the sophisticated Disk II interface for the Apple II, as well as before Commodore brute-forced the development of the C64 5 1/4″ drive, just about every house computer utilized cassette tapes for storage. Cassette tapes, mind you, not 8-track tapes. [Alec] believed this was a gross oversight of late 1970s engineers, so he developed a 8-track tape drive.
This really isn’t the very first instance of utilizing 8-tracks to store data on a computer. The Compucolor 8001 had a double outside 8-track drive, as well as the Exidy Sorcerer had a tape drive developed in to the ‘the keyboard is the computer’ type factor. It must be noted that almost nobody has heard about these two computers – the Compucolor offered about 25 units, for example – so we’ll just let that be a testament to the success of 8-track tape drives.
[Alec] installed an 8-track drive inside an old outside SCSI difficult drive enclosure. inside is an Arduino that controls the track select, tape insertion as well as end of tape signals. data is encoded with DTMF with an FSK encoding, just like the appropriate cassette data tapes of the early days.
On the computer side of things, [Alec] is utilizing a basic UNIX-style, pipe-based I/O. By encoding four bits on each track, he’s able to put an entire byte on two stereo tracks. The read/write speed is extremely sluggish – from the video after the break, we’re presuming [Alec] is running his tape drive ideal around 100 bits/second – much slower than really typing in data. This is most likely a issue with the 40-year-old 8-track tape he’s using, however as a proof of idea it’s not as well bad.