A Steady Vacuum For The Fastest Cassette Tape Drive Ever

June 5, 2025 by Jenny List 39 Comments

If you think of a 1960s mainframe computer, it’s likely that your mental image includes alongside the cabinets with the blinkenlights, a row of reel-to-reel tape drives. These refrigerator-sized units had a superficial resemblance to an audio tape deck, but with the tape hanging down in a loop either side of the head assembly. This loop was held by a vacuum to allow faster random access speeds at the head, and this fascinates [Thorbjörn Jemander]. He’s trying to create a cassette tape drive that can load 64 kilobytes in ten seconds, so he’s starting by replicating the vacuum columns of old.

The video below is the first of a series on this project, and aside from explaining the tape drive’s operation, it’s really an in-depth exploration of centrifugal fan design. He discovers that it’s speed rather than special impeller design that matters, and in particular a closed impeller delivers the required vacuum. We like his home-made manometer in particular.

What he comes up with is a 3D printed contraption with a big 12 volt motor on the back, and a slot for a cassette on the front. It achieves the right pressure, and pulls the tape neatly down into a pair of loops. We’d be curious to know whether a faster motor such as you might find in a drone would deliver more for less drama, but we can see the genesis of a fascinating project here. Definitely a series to watch.

Meanwhile, if your interest extends to those early machine rooms, have a wallow in the past.

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This Vintage Computing Device Is No Baby Food

July 20, 2024 by Al Williams 10 Comments

Today, if you want a computer for a particular task, you go shopping. But in the early days of computing, exotic applications needed custom computers. What’s more is that with the expense of computers, you likely got one made that fit exactly what you needed and no more. That led to many oddball one-off or nearly one-off computers during that time frame. Same for peripheral devices — you built what you had to and you left the rest on the drafting table. [Vintage Geek] got his hands on what appears to be one of them: the Gerber Scientific 6200.

While Gerber Scientific is still around, we’ve never heard of the 6200. Based on the serial number, we would guess at least 62 of them were made and this one has an interesting backstory of living in someone’s home who worked at the Pentagon. We presume the tapes were erased before it was sold!

Design-wise, it is pretty standard stuff. A 19-inch rack, a standard tape drive from Kennedy, a power supply, and some cards. The box takes 240 V, so the computer didn’t get powered up, but an examination of the inside looked like this really was a one-off with handwritten labels on masking tape.

We couldn’t tell for sure if the device was a computer itself, or just a tape drive and maybe plotter interface for another computer. If you know anything about this device, we are sure [Vintage Geek] would like to hear from you.

If this does turn out to have a CPU onboard, we’d bet it is bit sliced. If you have a 9-track tape machine, you may have to make your own tapes soon.

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Bespoke Storage Technologies: The Alphabet Soup Found In Modern Hard Drives And Beyond

November 4, 2020 by Bob Baddeley 70 Comments

It seems like just yesterday (maybe for some of you it was) we were installing Windows 3.1 off floppy drives onto a 256 MB hard drive, but hard drives have since gotten a lot bigger and a lot more complicated, and there are a lot more options than spinning platters.

The explosion of storage options is the result of addressing a variety of niches of use. The typical torrenter downloads a file, which is written once but read many times. For some people a drive is used as a backup that’s stored elsewhere and left unpowered. For others it is a server frequently reading and writing data like logs or swap files. In all cases it’s physics that sets the limits of what storage media can do; if you choose wisely for your use case you’ll get the bet performance.

The jargon in this realm is daunting: superparamagnetic limit, LMR, PMR, CMR, SMR, HAMR, MAMR, EAMR, XAMR, and QLC to name the most common. Let’s take a look at how we got here, and how the past and present of persistent storage have expanded what the word hard drive actually means and what is found under the hood.

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The ZX Microdrive: Budget Data Storage, 1980s Style

September 18, 2020 by Jenny List 53 Comments

An enduring memory for most who used the 8-bit home computers of the early 1980s is the use of cassette tapes for program storage. Only the extremely well-heeled could afford a disk drive, so if you didn’t fancy the idea of waiting an eternity for your code to load then you were out of luck. If you had a Sinclair Spectrum though, by 1983 you had another option in the form of the unique Sinclair ZX Microdrive.

This was a format developed in-house by Sinclair Research that was essentially a miniaturized version of the endless-loop tape carts which had appeared as 8-track Hi-Fi cartridges in the previous decade, and promised lightning fast load times of within a few seconds along with a relatively huge storage capacity of over 80 kB. Sinclair owners could take their place alongside the Big Boys of the home computer world, and they could do so without breaking the bank too much.

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Commodore Tape Drive Emulator On A Raspberry Pi

December 17, 2019 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

We imagine most of the people reading Hackaday have an old Raspberry Pi or two laying around. It’s somewhat less likely you’ve still got an 8-bit Commodore in working condition, but we’d wager there’s more than a few in the audience that can count themselves among both groups. So why not introduce them?

[RhinoDevel] writes in to tell us about CBM Tape Pi , an open source Commodore tape drive emulator for Raspberry Pi that needs only a handful of passive components to get wired up. Even better, the project targets the older Pis that are more likely to be languishing around in the parts bin. In the video after the break, a Commodore PET can be seen happily loading content from the original Raspberry Pi with its quaint little composite video connector.

Without any special software on the Commodore itself, the project allows the user to load and save PRGs on the Pi’s SD card, as well as traverse directories. Don’t expect stellar I/O, as [RhinoDevel] notes that no fast loader is currently implemented. Of course if you’re enough of a devotee to still be poking around a VIC-20 or C64 this far into 21st century, then we imagine you’ve got enough patience to get by.

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Atari Tape Drive Turned Security DVR

November 1, 2019 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

We know that a lot of our beloved readers don’t take kindly to abuse of vintage hardware, so the Atari fans in the audience may want to avert their eyes for this one. Especially if they’re particularly keen on spinning up their Jawbreaker cassette on authentic hardware, as [iot4c] has gutted an Atari XC12 Program Recorder to turn it into an enclosure for a Raspberry Pi video storage device.

Step one of this conversion was, as you might expect, removing all the original hardware from the cassette recorder case. From there, [iot4c] fitted the Raspberry Pi, a USB hard drive, and a YDS-5A DC-DC converter to power them. Depending on what the drive setup looks like, it might also make sense to add a USB powered hub. A length of Ethernet cable was left hanging out the back of the Atari XC12 so it could be plugged into the network, but a panel mount RJ45 connector could spruce things up a bit.

Of course, gutting an old piece of hardware and sticking a Pi into it isn’t exactly breaking any new ground at this point. But we did appreciate that [iot4c] went the extra mile to wire it up so the “Save” LED now doubles as a network activity indicator. Which pretty much brings it full circle in terms of functionality for a network-attached video recorder.

Earlier in the year [iot4c] converted a 65XE into a USB keyboard with the help of an Arduino Leonardo, but the vintage Atari aficionados will be happy to note that at least in that case the donor machine remained fully functional.

Teardown: D50761 Aircraft Quick Access Recorder

October 15, 2018 by Tom Nardi 37 Comments

Everyone’s heard of the “black box”. Officially known as the Flight Data Recorder (FDR), it’s a mandatory piece of equipment on commercial aircraft. The FDR is instrumental in investigating incidents or crashes, and is specifically designed to survive should the aircraft be destroyed. The search for the so-called “black box” often dominates the news cycle after the loss of a commercial aircraft; as finding it will almost certainly be necessary to determine the true cause of the accident. What you probably haven’t heard of is a Quick Access Recorder (QAR).

While it’s the best known, the FDR is not the only type of recording device used in aviation. The QAR could be thought of as the non-emergency alternative to the FDR. While retrieving data from the FDR usually means the worst has happened, the QAR is specifically designed to facilitate easy and regular access to flight data for research and maintenance purposes. Its data is stored on removable media and since the QAR is not expected to survive the loss of the aircraft it isn’t physically hardened. In fact, modern aircraft often use consumer-grade technology such as Compact Flash cards and USB flash drives as storage media in their QAR.

Through the wonders of eBay, I recently acquired a vintage Penny & Giles D50761 Quick Access Recorder. This was pulled out of an aircraft which had been in service with the now defunct airline, Air Toulouse International. Let’s crack open this relatively obscure piece of equipment and see just what goes into the hardware that airlines trust to help ensure their multi-million dollar aircraft are operating in peak condition.

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