On the Other Hand, a blog by Josh Ourisman.
A really ridiculous hardware question
Nov 1st, 2008
To celebrate the dawning of November, I have a really ridiculous hardware question (as you may have guessed from the title of this post).
Does anyone out there, in the whole of the internet, know where one might find and, ideally, purchase a compact cassette data drive? Yes, those funny things that we used to listen to music on in the 80s can also be used to store data. If anyone could help me find some such hardware and, ideally, some Linux drivers for it I would be very appreciative.
[Edit: Some further research has shown that the data on such drives is stored in an analog manner, and therefore is essentially just a recording of the 'sound' of the digital data. So any old tape player should do so long as it can be hooked up to the audio in/out of the computer. Proper software to demodulate the analogue signal is, of course, necessary, but there's plenty of stuff already out there to build on (it would basically just be an acoustic coupler). The only problem with using a standard tape player is that it's not going to be computer controlled and so will need to manually be stopped and started as necessary.]
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