3 ms·
I have some nostalgia for most technologies. Tapes and printers, not so much.
by andrewstuart 3y ago
I have some nostalgia for most technologies.
Tapes and printers, not so much.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoTape is still amazing in terms of data density and storage longevity
- ggm 3y agoI could probably fit my entire MP3 collection as FLAC on a single DLT. Shame abou the seek times but some kind of lower bitrate forward coding across the entire dataset, a cache and seek times might not matter as much for long plays. It would be very silly to repurpose a DLT tape library for an audio jukebox: one which carried "lethal to enter if not disarmed" stickers and a ruinous electricity bill.
- jacquesm 3y agoAt a half decent compression rate it probably fits on a large micro SD card as well, unless you have thousands of records.
- meindnoch 3y agoWhy would you store MP3 as FLAC?
- ggm 3y agoI would re-encode from the original or get flac. What I have digitally is compressed because of history, more than anything else. It was a figure of speech. The point is a single DLT is huge. Well .. LTO.
- Filligree 3y agoIt’s just a pity they’re so expensive. By rights I should be using tape for my backups, but even a single tape drive is…
- ggm 3y agoFor anyone who wonders a single LTO9 tape is about $250 and holds 45TB. I'm holding about 15 to 20 years data hoarding at home on 6TB zfs. So for me, cold storage for life would be at this price point. As you say the drive is heinous too: $10k+
- anonymous_sorry 3y agoNot analogue audio cassettes though. They would get tangled in the tape deck, and be ruined. They would sightly unspool themselves, get caught on something or twisted, and be ruined. They would stretch with overuse, distorting the audio horribly and/or comically, and be ruined. In my youth it seemed like every major roadside was littered with discarded audio tape. Clumps of tangled brown film dolefully flapping about in the breeze. This is not a format to be overly nostalgic for.
- coldtea 3y agoTapes where great - if you mean audio tapes. Printers are crap even today.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoYeah, thankfully we don't need them that often anymore. That said, is there a convenient, compact printer for documents (greyscale is fine) for the just in case times? I think I've seen a compact bar shaped laser printer aimed at laptops, but I'm afraid of the toner cartridges being overpriced or hard to find.
- soco 3y agoIt will probably still run with the same Windows driver written in late 90's in Win16 then patched and glued and slightly tilted to kinda work even today, kinda. Because here's where the real adventure happens, between buggy drivers and prehistoric spoolers.
- dale_glass 3y agoAudio tapes were crap for most people. There was good tape certainly -- reel to reel, metal tapes, etc. But most people used the cheap normal tape, and probably C120 which had a tendency to get tangled in the mechanism. Modern dirt cheap 44.1 KHz/16 bit audio is far superior to anything you could get in the tape era, except maybe a reel to reel tape set to the high quality speed. And even the best tape still had some wow and flutter because it's ultimately a mechanical device with imperfect speed control.
- jacquesm 3y agoWe did - briefly - have the DAT (digital audio tape) format.
- flyinghamster 3y agoThat got kneecapped by the recording industry [0], and the result was that consumer interest was near zero. Once recordable CDs and then MP3 and friends came on the scene, it was rendered irrelevant. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
- Sosh101 3y agoTapes gave us the mix-tape - a beautiful thing for sharing.