• (cs)

    Never would have happened if he had been listening to Stairway.

  • (cs)

    If the tape contained "Smooth Jazz" it would have simply increased the price of every item by 20%.

  • Email (unregistered)

    What? Free Bird by Kou Otani? Cool. (I also clicked on the youtube link to the song above, and I'm pretty sure that I have never heard that song before ...)

    One word. Thundercooperfalconbird.

    Sorry for the trite post :(

  • TN (unregistered) in reply to snoofle

    "Sounds like someplace where management listened to IT, took what seemed like reasonable risks, and in spite of some glitches (eg: someone making critical equipment accessible to untrained people), eventually, came out ahead."

    That's what I was thinking. It sounded like a pretty competently run company/IT division. Management even had the balls to do the right thing (shut down the stores to make everything right).

  • David Walker (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5
    danixdefcon5:
    On the bright side, I think this guy may have been the first step towards the almighty MP3.

    And... I wonder, was "Free Bird" recorded in a Type IV (METAL) cassette?? Those HP data cassettes my dad had were all Type IV, which has a nice dent right in the middle of the cassette, which my 1981 stereo system uses to identify that specific type of cassette.

    Then again, I wasn't even born in the 70's, so maybe the METAL cassettes were actually used for other things than data back then...

    Those "Metal" cassettes were only for heavy metal music. Hard rock was sometimes OK. But Free Bird doesn't qualify.

  • MonsterTrimble (unregistered) in reply to seamustheseagull

    Two words: Teddy Ruxpin

  • Brian (unregistered)

    Feverishly not feverously.

  • (cs) in reply to David Walker
    David Walker:
    Those "Metal" cassettes were only for heavy metal music. Hard rock was sometimes OK. But Free Bird doesn't qualify.
    Nope. Free Bird is of the genre known as "southern rock", which is celebrated (and pretty much enumerated, too, at least through the year it was written) by the Charlie Daniels Band's song, "The South's Gonna Do It Again".
  • Jessica (unregistered) in reply to TC
    TC:
    william:
    TRWTF is using audio cassette tapes that if a music audio tape is played could potentially corrupt the whole database system

    I learned my first programming language on a TI-99 back around 1984. I used cassette tapes to save my programs. They were slooooooooooooooooooow (sequential access only, of course :( ). I never tried to get anything off an audio tape, though. But they all looked the same (except the ones with my programs had no labels on them :) Darn, I missed a perfect opportunity to experiment and possibly mess up a TI-99!

    I tried it on my TI-99 when I was a kid. It probably wasn't great for the music tape I used, and of course the attempt to load the "program" crapped out after reading the audio for awhile and getting sherbet, but it didn't break anything.

  • (cs)

    They failed early; they took the steps necessary to recover; and they learned.

    Recipe for success. No silver bullets need apply.

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to william
    william:
    TRWTF is using audio cassette tapes that if a music audio tape is played could potentially corrupt the whole database system

    Cassette tape drives were affordable high-technology in the early 1970's. Hard disks were the size of a closet or larger, and floppy disk drives and the 8" floppies themselves were expensive. Special cassette tapes would have cost more than the off-the-shelf kind.

    The Commodore PET CP/M computer came with a cassette tape drive built into the box, above the keyboard. I used one in grade school in 1982.

  • John Wilson (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that anyone thinks this is actually possible. I'm sorry, but you can't just put a music cassette into a 1970's 300 baud modem, and expect the receiving modem to think it's data. It just cannot happen. Period.

    Protocols, people! They exist for a reason!

  • John (unregistered)

    TRWTF:

    As the IT staff worked feverously...

    It's a word, but it's way less common than "feverishly". Unless you're portmanteauing "feverishly" and "furiously".

  • Charles (unregistered)

    ( Holds lighter above head in dark storeroom )

  • (cs) in reply to John
    John:
    TRWTF:
    As the IT staff worked feverously...

    It's a word, but it's way less common than "feverishly". Unless you're portmanteauing "feverishly" and "furiously".

    It's no worse than verbing "portmanteau".

  • katastrofa (unregistered) in reply to JJK
    JJK:
    More of a lesson-to-be-learned than a WTF, but interesting to read none-the-less.

    I think more upper-management in the industry need to be made aware of stories like this. With IT budgets getting tighter, the first things to get slimmed down are usually back-up and disaster-recovery capacity.

    Nothing like a real (but recoverable from) disaster to correct such behaviour.

  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to John Wilson
    John Wilson:
    TRWTF is that anyone thinks this is actually possible. I'm sorry, but you can't just put a music cassette into a 1970's 300 baud modem, and expect the receiving modem to think it's data. It just cannot happen. Period.

    Protocols, people! They exist for a reason!

    Uh, you think the cash register just wrote a modem conversation to tape (complete with key tones for dialing, assuming that was implemented back then) and the Transmitter was nothing more than a tape player that played over the phone line? More likely, the transmitter WAS a modem, and it was taking its input from the garbage that came from attempts to interpret the tape.

    Though I guess it's not impossible to record a modem conversation--Information Society did it as a bonus track on 2 of their albums.

  • (cs) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    It's no worse than verbing "portmanteau".
    But... but... verb is a noun...

    head explodes

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    akatherder:
    It's no worse than verbing "portmanteau".
    But... but... verb is a noun...

    head explodes

    What's so incromulent about it?
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to John Wilson
    John Wilson:
    TRWTF is that anyone thinks this is actually possible. I'm sorry, but you can't just put a music cassette into a 1970's 300 baud modem, and expect the receiving modem to think it's data. It just cannot happen. Period.

    Protocols, people! They exist for a reason!

    It wasn't put directly into the modem. A computer opened the connections and did the necessary protocol things, and then just dumped the tape as raw data. It's the equivalent of /dev/random

  • TInkerghost (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    John Wilson:
    TRWTF is that anyone thinks this is actually possible. I'm sorry, but you can't just put a music cassette into a 1970's 300 baud modem, and expect the receiving modem to think it's data. It just cannot happen. Period.

    Protocols, people! They exist for a reason!

    It wasn't put directly into the modem. A computer opened the connections and did the necessary protocol things, and then just dumped the tape as raw data. It's the equivalent of /dev/random

    Hmm, I would think punk or thrash would be more similar to /dev/random. "Freebird" is more of echo sleep(300)

  • (cs) in reply to Bappi
    Bappi:
    snoofle:
    akatherder:
    It's no worse than verbing "portmanteau".
    But... but... verb is a noun...

    head explodes

    What's so incromulent about it?
    As pointed out (to me) in a previous thread, the adjective "cromulent" admits of no modifiers; including the negative prefix (and you're assuming an etymology here).

    Something is either "cromulent" or else a different thing altogether. "Pink" would be good.

  • (cs)

    This is, however, one of the most beautiful computer stories I've ever heard. It has Wu.

    The only actual WTF is that they forgot to maintain the original manual process, for which I forgive them, because it happened in the '70s, and I remember a visiting lecturer at Cambridge in 1985 pointing out that "The key thing is not to throw away all the card indexing and original process." He was quite right. I assume he was speaking from experience, around ten years after this little tale. And the sad thing is, almost nobody in the twenty years since has paid the slightest bit of attention to this fairly obvious rule.

    I am now going to bookmark this WTF for the first time ever.

    Brillant!

  • John Wilson (unregistered) in reply to Dan
    Uh, you think the cash register just wrote a modem conversation to tape (complete with key tones for dialing, assuming that was implemented back then) and the Transmitter was nothing more than a tape player that played over the phone line? More likely, the transmitter WAS a modem, and it was taking its input from the garbage that came from attempts to interpret the tape.

    Uh, you think I'm a moron?

    Of course the cash machine didn't write dialing tones to the tape (it was pulse, incidentally, not tone). But the tape contained something that was supposed to be interpreted as data. Data must be transmitted. That data must be transmitted over a modem, and that data must conform to the V.12 standard for a 300 baud modem.

    Have you ever actually used a 300 baud modem?

    Yes; the transmitter was a modem. Yes, It may have tried to take it's input from the tape being played over the modem line. But no: it was not "taking its input from the garbage that came from attempts to interpret the tape". It can't. It is neither logically nor physically possible for one simple reason: there is no V.12 carrier signal in "Free Bird".

    You might as well argue that an AM radio can play a VHF signal, just because radio waves are involved.

  • John Wilson (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    John Wilson:
    TRWTF is that anyone thinks this is actually possible. I'm sorry, but you can't just put a music cassette into a 1970's 300 baud modem, and expect the receiving modem to think it's data. It just cannot happen. Period.

    Protocols, people! They exist for a reason!

    It wasn't put directly into the modem. A computer opened the connections and did the necessary protocol things, and then just dumped the tape as raw data. It's the equivalent of /dev/random

    {bangs head against desk} It {Bang!} Doesn't {Bang!} Work {Bang!} Like {Bang!} That! {Bang!}

    There is no carrier on a music tape! It cannot be transmitted over a V.12/300 baud modem! Can't be done!

    Seriously! Why do you think it was so hard to get a C-64 or a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum to load a data cassette!

  • John Wilson (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    John Wilson:
    TRWTF is that anyone thinks this is actually possible. I'm sorry, but you can't just put a music cassette into a 1970's 300 baud modem, and expect the receiving modem to think it's data. It just cannot happen. Period.

    Protocols, people! They exist for a reason!

    It wasn't put directly into the modem. A computer opened the connections and did the necessary protocol things, and then just dumped the tape as raw data. It's the equivalent of /dev/random

    {bangs head against desk} It {Bang!} Doesn't {Bang!} Work {Bang!} Like {Bang!} That! {Bang!}

    There is no carrier on a music tape! It cannot be transmitted over a V.12/300 baud modem! Can't be done!

    Seriously! Why do you think it was so hard to get a C-64 or a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum to load a data cassette!

  • (cs) in reply to David Walker
    David Walker:
    Those "Metal" cassettes were only for heavy metal music. Hard rock was sometimes OK. But Free Bird doesn't qualify.
    Now I understand why most of the IT staff listen Heavy Metal. Its in our roots!!!

    By the way ... I never used "data" tape drives, but I would assume that the tape reader/transmitter would read the tape in all its raw glory, take the "data" and transmit it through the 300 baud modem. In this process, any encoding would be performed by the device itself, so the transmission would have had V.12 carrier signals, even if it was transmitting junk.

    Hell, I might even pass a crapload of magnets over a hard disk, plug it into a PC, and make a program transmit whatever it finds in /dev/sda (as the partition table would surely be trashed) and even be able to transmit something, even if it is garbage. Error correction wasn't exactly top priority back then ... older versions of System/360 didn't even have an EOF marker, for example.

  • cat (unregistered) in reply to John Wilson
    John Wilson:
    V.12/300 baud
    V.12? Electrical characteristics for balanced double-current interchange circuits for interfaces with data signalling rates up to 52 Mbit/s ? From 1995? Most likely it was reading straight FSK off the tape, in which case it'd be quite possible to get random noise from any input signal.
  • John Wilson (unregistered) in reply to cat
    cat:
    John Wilson:
    V.12/300 baud
    V.12? Electrical characteristics for balanced double-current interchange circuits for interfaces with data signalling rates up to 52 Mbit/s ? From 1995? Most likely it was reading straight FSK off the tape, in which case it'd be quite possible to get random noise from any input signal.

    Most likely is it didn't happen. Occam's Razor applies.

  • CoyneT (unregistered) in reply to John Wilson
    John Wilson:
    Uh, you think the cash register just wrote a modem conversation to tape (complete with key tones for dialing, assuming that was implemented back then) and the Transmitter was nothing more than a tape player that played over the phone line? More likely, the transmitter WAS a modem, and it was taking its input from the garbage that came from attempts to interpret the tape.

    Uh, you think I'm a moron?

    Of course the cash machine didn't write dialing tones to the tape (it was pulse, incidentally, not tone). But the tape contained something that was supposed to be interpreted as data. Data must be transmitted. That data must be transmitted over a modem, and that data must conform to the V.12 standard for a 300 baud modem.

    Have you ever actually used a 300 baud modem?

    Yes; the transmitter was a modem. Yes, It may have tried to take it's input from the tape being played over the modem line. But no: it was not "taking its input from the garbage that came from attempts to interpret the tape". It can't. It is neither logically nor physically possible for one simple reason: there is no V.12 carrier signal in "Free Bird".

    You might as well argue that an AM radio can play a VHF signal, just because radio waves are involved.

    Modem designs were dumb in those days. The carrier really wasn't necessary either to keep the connection open or to communicate data. All it really did was turn off the echo suppression in the phone exchange, so that the modems could use full duplex.

    Around 1976, I used one of those modems you dropped a phone handset into. If I whistled to it I could get it to turn its carrier on, just like there was a connection to another computer. Exact tone didn't matter: My whistle just had to be loud enough and near enough.

    Once I had the modem going, the connected teletype would become active, clearly receiving something. Occasionally, it would even print a random character (though apparently most of what I whistled wasn't printable).

  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to John Wilson
    John Wilson:
    Uh, you think the cash register just wrote a modem conversation to tape (complete with key tones for dialing, assuming that was implemented back then) and the Transmitter was nothing more than a tape player that played over the phone line? More likely, the transmitter WAS a modem, and it was taking its input from the garbage that came from attempts to interpret the tape.

    Uh, you think I'm a moron?

    Yes; the transmitter was a modem. Yes, It may have tried to take it's input from the tape being played over the modem line. But no: it was not "taking its input from the garbage that came from attempts to interpret the tape". It can't. It is neither logically nor physically possible for one simple reason: there is no V.12 carrier signal in "Free Bird".

    Apparently you DO think it's passing the tape recording without modulating it. That's not what a modem does.

    Yes I've used a 300 baud modem before. The MODEM generates the carrier, regardless of what the data is. It is 1070 or 1270Hz depending on whether it's sending a 1 or a 0. So all it needs is a data source telling it whether to send a 1 or a 0. And with Freebird in this case, you get magic garbage on the other end.

    And BTW, parity, if that was even used, still gives you a 50/50 chance of validating a junk byte on the receiver end.

    So stop beating your head on the desk.

  • (cs) in reply to cat
    cat:
    Most likely it was reading straight FSK off the tape, in which case it'd be quite possible to get random noise from any input signal.
    I am also inclined to believe that...
    AFSK is not generally used for high-speed data communications, as it is much less efficient in both power and bandwidth than most other modulation modes. In addition to its simplicity, however, AFSK has the advantage that encoded signals will pass through AC-coupled links, including most equipment originally designed to carry music or speech.
    Occam's Razor actually tells us it is very likely medium from the 1970's just assumed it was data in the medium, instead of going into fancy-shmancy "error detection" routines; especially when it is assumed that the operators are highly trained on their equipment. Remember, there were no Joe Average guys operating computers back then!

    I still wonder what would the output have been if the guy had actually put Heavy Metal on that loader. And if "Free Bird" took down an entire inventory ... what mayhem would "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" cause??? And I'm talking about the full, 18-minute version!

    Addendum (2008-07-09 18:27): Ah, found this:

    Some early microcomputers used a specific form of AFSK modulation, the Kansas City standard, to store data on audio cassettes.
  • (cs) in reply to silent d
    silent d:
    Just tune in any classic rock station. The FCC requires that they play either a station ID or Freebird every 20 minutes.

    OK, so why isn't this comment "featured"?

  • Manic Mailman (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    Bappi:
    What's so incromulent about it?
    As pointed out (to me) in a previous thread, the adjective "cromulent" admits of no modifiers; including the negative prefix (and you're assuming an etymology here).

    Something is either "cromulent" or else a different thing altogether. "Pink" would be good.

    More concisely, "incromulent" is not a perfectly cromulent word.

  • miik (unregistered) in reply to the amazing null

    The song "won't get fooled again" messed up he diebold voting machines on election day and look what happened.

  • Monkey Brains (unregistered)

    "While it didn’t quite have the prestige of a big city department store like Saks Fifth Avenue, it certainly had the technology of one."

    I was a programmer at Saks before it was bought by Proffitt’s. All the glitz was where the customer could see it. Behind the scenes was the opposite, including the technology. In the mid 90's they were using an hierarchical database called IDMS. The joke was that stood for "It don't make sense." The IT department did not have swanky offices in downtown Manhattan, but were housed in a ex-bank building outside Trenton, NJ.

  • (cs)

    Ok, who added this article as an external link for Proffitt's wikipedia page?

  • ContraCorners (unregistered) in reply to Andy Goth

    Riigghhttt. That's what it would take. Another solution would be some sort of user authentication process. Make the user enter somesort of...whdaya call it... password? after the press the big green button.

  • no (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    "The key thing is not to throw away all the card indexing and original process." He was quite right. I assume he was speaking from experience, around ten years after this little tale. And the sad thing is, almost nobody in the twenty years since has paid the slightest bit of attention to this fairly obvious rule.

    I am now going to bookmark this WTF for the first time ever.

    Brillant!

    Bookmark it? H ave you learned nothing?

    I am going to write down the complete article, URL and associated comments in my TDWTF archive note pad. I might photo copy it for some added redundancy.

  • (cs) in reply to SomeCoder
    SomeCoder:
    FredSaw:
    seamustheseagull:
    Programmer 2: Why would someone do that?
    When I was writing apps for use in the production control department of a steel fabrication company, I used to deliver my latest effort to the department manager, who in his testing would then do something as ridiculous as playing "Free Bird" into it. It sometimes took him about eight seconds to crash the program. And watching over his shoulder, I would exclaim, "Why did you do that?!". His reply was, "Because my employees will do it."

    I had a teacher in one of my very first programming classes that would do this. He would tell us "you have to make the program idiot proof". We'd all chuckle and go along coding.

    Then when he'd come by to test your program, you'd watch him enter something completely random and crash the program.

    "Why did you enter that??"

    "I told you to make it idiot proof."

    We learned quickly from that teacher.

    I would have LOVED to have that teacher when I took Intro to C. The reason?

    Program: Please enter an age:

    Teacher: nvij78vncjt236m,b

    Program: Please enter an age: 78236 Program: 78,236 seems a bit excessive, are you sure you wish to enter an age over 150?

    See, I ripped out and validated everything AS IT WAS TYPED. It would have beeped furiously as he tried to enter non-numeric charecters, and allow numeric characters through. In the later question, it would allow only 1, 0, y, n, t, or f through, and translate "y" into "yes", "f" into "false", etc, with backspace wiping the whole word. I don't particularly like C/C++'s input systems, can you tell?

    But that's because I was self taught; by the time I took classes it was just to get units for a $10,000 peice of paper, not to learn anything. Oh I hoped to learn something, but all I learned was how to teach when the professors were too lazy to do so themselves...

    I want to know what that particular teacher would have thought of a student building in such extensive validation right off the bat.

  • (cs) in reply to no
    no:
    real_aardvark:
    "The key thing is not to throw away all the card indexing and original process." He was quite right. I assume he was speaking from experience, around ten years after this little tale. And the sad thing is, almost nobody in the twenty years since has paid the slightest bit of attention to this fairly obvious rule.

    I am now going to bookmark this WTF for the first time ever.

    Brillant!

    Bookmark it? H ave you learned nothing?

    I am going to write down the complete article, URL and associated comments in my TDWTF archive note pad. I might photo copy it for some added redundancy.

    Don't forget to print it out, put it onto a wooden table, take a polaroid, scan it, email it to yourself, print it out, put it in a manila envelope and mail it to timbuktu.

  • jaded (unregistered) in reply to John Wilson
    John Wilson:
    Anonymous:
    John Wilson:
    TRWTF is that anyone thinks this is actually possible. I'm sorry, but you can't just put a music cassette into a 1970's 300 baud modem, and expect the receiving modem to think it's data. It just cannot happen. Period.

    Protocols, people! They exist for a reason!

    It wasn't put directly into the modem. A computer opened the connections and did the necessary protocol things, and then just dumped the tape as raw data. It's the equivalent of /dev/random

    {bangs head against desk} It {Bang!} Doesn't {Bang!} Work {Bang!} Like {Bang!} That! {Bang!}

    There is no carrier on a music tape! It cannot be transmitted over a V.12/300 baud modem! Can't be done!

    Seriously! Why do you think it was so hard to get a C-64 or a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum to load a data cassette!

    As many other people have mentioned, the "audio" from the tape was not fed into the modem or the phone line.

    The store's manager would tell the system to send the data. The POS server would then dial a modem and establish the connection to the headquarters site. At that time, it would start reading from the cassette and copying the bytes from the cassette drive port to the modem port. There was no packet protocol, just a sign-on exchange followed by a "start receiving data" command sequence, followed by the data, followed by a "stop receiving data" sequence.

    The data was recorded on a cassette tape using FSK. There is no carrier wave involved in FSK: there are simply two different frequencies, one denoting mark and one denoting space. If the audio was even close to a decodable bit, the appropriate 1 or 0 was placed in the buffer. Parity checks were supposed to be used to identify corrupt data, but were not required.

    Of course, this was taking place over an expensive long distance phone call, so protocol was kept to a minimum. It's possible that parity checking would have been turned off to avoid the added expense. Consider that adding a parity bit to each byte would have increased every phone call's duration by about 10 percent.

    By the time I was ever involved with these systems it was at their end of life. My job was on the team writing the replacement system on a then-modern IBM 4680 system.

    I still have the 30-year-old memory card from that first Unitote POS server I decommissioned hanging on my cube wall. It's 16KB of hand-made ferrite core memory, and is a real work of art. I even have a small hand-held microscope available so visitors can see the toroids and the wires threaded through them.

  • Bruteforce (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel
    Erzengel:
    SomeCoder:
    FredSaw:
    seamustheseagull:
    Programmer 2: Why would someone do that?
    When I was writing apps for use in the production control department of a steel fabrication company, I used to deliver my latest effort to the department manager, who in his testing would then do something as ridiculous as playing "Free Bird" into it. It sometimes took him about eight seconds to crash the program. And watching over his shoulder, I would exclaim, "Why did you do that?!". His reply was, "Because my employees will do it."

    I had a teacher in one of my very first programming classes that would do this. He would tell us "you have to make the program idiot proof". We'd all chuckle and go along coding.

    Then when he'd come by to test your program, you'd watch him enter something completely random and crash the program.

    "Why did you enter that??"

    "I told you to make it idiot proof."

    We learned quickly from that teacher.

    I would have LOVED to have that teacher when I took Intro to C. The reason?

    Program: Please enter an age:

    Teacher: nvij78vncjt236m,b

    Program: Please enter an age: 78236 Program: 78,236 seems a bit excessive, are you sure you wish to enter an age over 150?

    See, I ripped out and validated everything AS IT WAS TYPED. It would have beeped furiously as he tried to enter non-numeric charecters, and allow numeric characters through. In the later question, it would allow only 1, 0, y, n, t, or f through, and translate "y" into "yes", "f" into "false", etc, with backspace wiping the whole word. I don't particularly like C/C++'s input systems, can you tell?

    But that's because I was self taught; by the time I took classes it was just to get units for a $10,000 peice of paper, not to learn anything. Oh I hoped to learn something, but all I learned was how to teach when the professors were too lazy to do so themselves...

    I want to know what that particular teacher would have thought of a student building in such extensive validation right off the bat.

    I had a teacher like that. All he did when you aced a task was put his hands on his knees and say "Well done. Professional quality software" and leave. And oh, me and a friend were the only two, ever, in his entire career as a teacher for universities that aced one of his programming tasks. ;) And now that he is retired, I dare say noone else will either. ;)

  • oh, wait, sony did that once... (unregistered) in reply to the amazing null

    I LOL'ed.

  • david (unregistered)

    AM Radio station here used to play C40 tapes live to air during their 'computer' segment. You could download code live. Was that a radio modem?

    By the way, it was possible to use standard modem tones to record data to cassettes. Dunno if C40 did it that way (using the same high/low tones as 300 Baud), but no reason not to. Using a system like that, you would simply play the tape into the telephone, after dialling. There was no 'carrier' or speed or protocol negotiation on those 300 Baud systems. All you would need was tape recorder at the other end.

  • (cs)

    Making a program "idiot proof" only results in the world coming up with a better idiot.

  • oloron (unregistered) in reply to silent d

    heh, doesnt leave much time for commercials,news,weather,whatnot :) but sounds like a station i would tune into :D

  • 35% Genius (unregistered) in reply to John Wilson
    John Wilson:
    Anonymous:
    John Wilson:
    TRWTF is that anyone thinks this is actually possible. I'm sorry, but you can't just put a music cassette into a 1970's 300 baud modem, and expect the receiving modem to think it's data. It just cannot happen. Period.

    Protocols, people! They exist for a reason!

    It wasn't put directly into the modem. A computer opened the connections and did the necessary protocol things, and then just dumped the tape as raw data. It's the equivalent of /dev/random

    {bangs head against desk} It {Bang!} Doesn't {Bang!} Work {Bang!} Like {Bang!} That! {Bang!}

    There is no carrier on a music tape! It cannot be transmitted over a V.12/300 baud modem! Can't be done!

    Seriously! Why do you think it was so hard to get a C-64 or a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum to load a data cassette!

    The transmitter device reads the music tape as if it where a data tape. This generates a data stream of more or less random bits. This datastream is then fed into the modem which modulates it into a V.12/300 baud signal, including carrier.

    I hope your head gets better soon. Banging it on your desk will not have helped though.

  • (cs) in reply to Also a big geek
    Also a big geek:
    valerion:
    My ringtone is Free Bird. I guess the computer world has learnt from this lesson because the mobile network doesn't crash everytime someone calls me.

    If your ringtone is Free Bird, I'm guessing your phone doesn't ring very much.

    Do you even get coverage down in mom's basement?

    My phone rings plenty, thanks. And I get excellent coverage in my own house. I'm going to see my parents this weekend so I'll let you know about the basement thing, 'kay?

  • (cs) in reply to John Wilson
    John Wilson:
    Why do you think it was so hard to get a C-64 or a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum to load a data cassette!
    I never had any problems. I had a Boots cheap-o tape recorder that didn't bother with fancy filtering and stuff like that; it just pushed the signal to and from the tape. Worked like a dream with my Spectrum. (I think I've still got it in a storage box somewhere, though I'm more than a little hesitant to look at the programs I wrote back then…)

Leave a comment on “The Free Bird Database”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article