Hasn’t Time Flown?

Always Worth Saying, Going Postal
Gone with the fountain pen and fax machine.
Casette Tapes,
Paul Sableman
Licence CC BY-SA 2.0

The conversation ended as it often does with a young colleague reminding me it’s because I’m old. Perhaps because I really am old, I can’t remember the topic. Maybe the latest delivery of dog food or how high the kitchen rolls should be stacked? What I do know is we were sitting side by side inside a warehouse next to a motorway junction in our homely supermarket wardroom. As proof I’m old but not old-fashioned, although our shoulders were almost touching, we were having our disagreement by typing away online through a thing called ‘Snap’.

They want the over 60s like myself to return to work. Don’t forget, we can’t hear, can’t see, can’t remember, need the toilet every 15 minutes and are out-gunned by the young when it comes to conflict carried out through that horrid child of new technology, ‘social media.’ Conceding defeat, I signed out of the convo (yes, ‘convo’ – conversation is so last millennium) as ‘old’ me. Beyond never being able to win an argument on it, one of the other irritating features of Snapchat is that as you type it suggests emojis in place of words.

For those not (yet) forced by the gas and electricity bills to spend evenings and weekends toiling between the shelves with the young, an emoji is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion. As I typed in O-L-D, a nieve pastel graphic of a gentleman of a certain generation appeared instead of my letters. Ageing better than me, he still had grey hair to the side of a bald dome and even managed a moustache. One of the good things about my middle age is that I now only have to shave every three days. Beyond the spritely-looking chap with the tasche, other suggestions included once-modern objects now long gone, such as the fountain pen, computer disk and fax machine. Hasn’t time flown?

However, I do still possess an ink pen. In fact, two, because I’m always losing one and if I can’t find it I can usually find the other – another sign of being old. And they are kept busy, not least to post my gas and electricity readings to E.ON – in green writing and on blue note paper with all the numbers re-calculated to British Thermal Units. That’ll teach them to drag me from my model railway and gardening and force me in my twilight years towards the obnoxious four-letter pursuit known as W-O-R-K.

Beyond the pens, discs and clattery waxy paper outlet, another suggestion both caught my eye and set me off. Every school leaver in every supermarket in the land dreads the real-life, real-voice workplace monologue beginning, ‘Before you were born…’ In my case, I continue with references to a previous life more interesting where I had hair, teeth and twenty-twenty vision. A rotter called Chairman Mao threw a bamboo curtain around Communist China and Mrs Thatcher wanted me on the other side of it. Puffins, bargain hunters and shop girls have heard it all before.

But this time, what caught the eye wasn’t an emoji of a sinister oriental in a light blue suit, but a little plastic box with spools that sent me down one of my research rabbit holes or, literally, a memory hole. Try telling the youth of today to switch off Spotify, lose their mobile phone, throw away the airpods, buy a cassette player and feed it with cassettes and batteries. At least it’s something I know more about than they do.

The compact cassette, also known as the audio cassette or just cassette was introduced by Philips in 1963 in the Netherlands. Intended as a dictation device for office use, it evolved into a popular, convenient and portable medium for music recording and playback. A plastic case containing two miniature reels wound with magnetic tape could store audio. By the 1980s, they had overtaken vinyl records in popularity. The rise of digital media, especially CDs in the 1990s, led to a gradual decline in the cassette’s dominance. Production began to drop, with the format becoming obsolete by the early 2000s.

If the youth of today struggle to believe that, then they won’t believe this. The audio cassettes were also used to store computer data, programmes and games. Imagine, instead of downloading Snap from the App Store, you went to a shop, bought the Snapchat cassette tape and took it home and played it into your phone via a wire attached to a cassette player. It was once so. Plus, switching the phone off blanks the memory so every time you want to remotely contradict your elders on Snap, you have to repeat the process. And, by the way, your phone has so little memory you can only have one app on it at a time.

Back with the cassettes, inside each plastic shell, two spools held a stream of magnetic tape 0.15 inches wide. The standard tape length ranged from 15 to 120 minutes of playback, with the most common being C60 (30 minutes per side) and C90 (45 minutes per side). While balancing sound quality with storage capacity, the tape ran at a speed of 1⅞ inches per second. The tapes were coated with ferric oxide or chromium dioxide, with a magnetic recording head rearranging the magnetic particles of the oxide according to an incoming electric signal from, say, a microphone. A separate play head reversed the process to send an electric signal to a loudspeaker, earphones or, in the case of data, to a computer interface.

The standard track format was stereo, with four tracks—two per side—allowing for reversible playback. The cassette shell included felt pressure pads and guide rollers to ensure tape stability against the heads during playback and recording. Therefore, computer data could be stored in the form of sound, with a screechy noise being binary code sequences that had been turned into analogue waveforms. A process known as modulation. With the cassette as the medium, the code could then be recreated to a binary sequence in another computer from the received waveform (demodulation) via what we used to call an interface but which later became better known as a modem.

So, how much data did a compact cassette hold? Recollections vary. Our audio signal is measured in baud (signal changes/pulses per second) whereas our data is measured in kilobytes, with the two not being equivalent to each other. Asking those brainy people on Quora made it more complicated. I will quote the only answer I understood. The 1980s Sinclair Spectrum home computer processed a binary sequence to 563 bytes/second. Therefore, in theory, a C15 tape would be able to store ~500kB on average. Since the Spectrum only had 48k of memory this would appear to be more than sufficient. However, you could put more than one program onto a cassette with the Spectrum finding it by using LOAD “name of the program” while you played the entire tape.

Something else that those who know knew, was the importance of the ‘azimuth’, ie the angle between the recording and playback heads and the tape. This could be adjusted by a screw near the heads to give a clear, sharp sound. If this is all too complicated, or you don’t have a cassette player, then not to worry. Four decades ago you could buy programmes in the newsagents in printed form and then type them in. Not sure about the baud rate. Perhaps a page an hour? An advantage of this was you learned how to code as you put your young fingers to the rubber keyboard and bashed away.

The keywords used in the BASIC programming language were written on and near the Spectrum’s keys, with each button having more than one function via various types of shift. As you got the hang of it, you could think of your own improvements to the published programs and experiment and fiddle and start trying your own thing. An excellent way to learn. How do I know all of this? Because I dabbled. Bored stupid with my ‘clearing’ degree, I accidentally taught myself to code. Having mastered the bauds and azimuths and impressed family and friends with semicolons chasing letters around the screen while being shot at by full stops, why not produce something to sell? ‘Twas a seller’s market, with the home computers being sold by the million while software development lagged.

As with Snap and Spotify, likewise there was not yet an eBay or Amazon. Instead, something better, Exchange and Mart, a weekly newspaper advertising everything – from baby crocodiles to ammunition, from Southeast Asian brides to homemade budget brake fluid. Publish your advert and box number and wait for the postman to deliver the cheques, postal orders or cash neatly held within a folded covering letter. With none of this overnight delivery nonsense, there was no need to pay for any inputs until the finished product was sold and paid for – a manoeuvre still available these days within a supermarket’s supply chain but not to the small entrepreneur.

What happened next will remain a tale for another day. Suffice it to say, 1980s computer software was a good earner and I was and remain, a bad spender. Come to think of it, next time you see an old bloke struggling to keep up with the young ones in the supermarket aisles, keep in mind this might be good old-fashioned greed rather than a new necessity!

Always Worth Saying, Going Postal
© Always Worth Saying 2024, Going Postal

 

© Always Worth Saying 2024