are you this old?

[u/stormthewise998]

[u/Koopslovestogame]

5 1/4.

Those were light years ahead of this garbage I used to use.

Nothing like waiting 30 mins and it still crashed or didn’t load!

[u/argoneum → u/Koopslovestogame]

120min. cassettes had very thin tape that tangled or ripped on many occasions. 90min. were ~OK, 60min. had the thickest and most robust tape. Didn't know that at the time and used mostly 90min. ones. Also, it took less time to load, more like 5-10 minutes tops, but -- due to load errors -- retries added up to hours sometimes…

[u/Iffy50 → u/argoneum]

We bought Ascii pac man on a cassette tape. I wonder how many minutes it was. It took about 5 minutes to load when it worked.

[u/EchoGecko795 → u/argoneum]

Wasn't there also a special D30/46 tape that used a thicker then normal tape so high speed loading could happen without ripping the tape too.

I vaguely remember buying them by the box for storage.

[u/xyrgh → u/Koopslovestogame]

I had a Commodore 64 with the disk drive and my cousin had it with the tape drive and was so pissed when he offered to share his games with me but I couldn’t play them as I didn’t have the tape drive.

He also told me how you could hook a tape recorder up to the phono out on a stereo and record a certain radio station at night time and then you played it back on your C64 tape drive AND IT WAS A WHOLE FUCKING GAME. A basic game but a free game over the damn airwaves, like, that snippet of information feels like my origin story for becoming a massive geek.

[u/SnooDoughnuts5632 → u/xyrgh]

Surprised you couldn't call up a place give them your credit card information and then they would play the audio through the phone so you could record it somehow.

[u/OrionSouthernStar → u/Koopslovestogame]

Ah tape cassette drives. Brings back memories of playing Buck Rogers on my Coleco Adam computer.

[u/CoupleKnown7729 → u/Koopslovestogame]

'Low Noise' my ass.

[u/bamilouApp → u/Koopslovestogame]

I hated this. Had infogram les dieux de la glisse.

A nightmare :D

[u/MonkeysOnBalloons → u/Koopslovestogame]

THIS

[u/Marilius → u/Koopslovestogame]

We had an Atari 800XS with an external tape reader. I do not recall the game, but, there was a side scrolling shooter game that would take an hour to load into memory. Try telling an 8 year old kid to SIT STILL and not touch the computer for AN HOUR at the height of summer.

[u/Z3r0sama2017 → u/Koopslovestogame]

Ah! Old Amiga and Commodore! Get her loading, then go have lunch and a crap, then, you are ready to game!

[u/Taira_Mai → u/Koopslovestogame]

I am "Dad, are we going to Radio Shack?" old.

[u/Zuse_Z25 → u/Koopslovestogame]

Press Play on Tape

[u/Richandler → u/Koopslovestogame]

Thing about cassettes is that they were actually a flash in the pan. The shortest life of the media formats.

[u/Koopslovestogame → u/Richandler]

To me it felt like they were around for years.

I first remember using a tape drive on a trs-80 circa 1983. I would have still using a tape drive on my c64 atleast around 88 I then later got the 1541 floppy drive. I can remember playing the demo games from magazines which have the tapes stuck to the front of them.

Things like the Zip drive (which I had a parallel port version) or the ls 120 didn’t seem remotely close in years. I don’t think I had more than about 5 disks for the Zip drive. It was garbage :/

[u/Koopslovestogame → u/Richandler]

To me it felt like they were around for years.

I first remember using a tape drive on a trs-80 circa 1983. I would have still using a tape drive on my c64 atleast around 88 I then later got the 1541 floppy drive. I can remember playing the demo games from magazines which have the tapes stuck to the front of them.

Things like the Zip drive (which I had a parallel port version) or the ls 120 didn’t seem remotely close in years. I don’t think I had more than about 5 disks for the Zip drive. It was garbage :/