LGR Oddware - Datasonix Pereos Cassette Backup System
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- Опубликовано: 22 фев 2018
- Backing up computer data on the world's smallest cassette tape? Yes, plz. The Datasonix Pereos used Sony NT digital microcassettes to store up to 1.25 gigabytes on a Windows 3.1 PC! In 1994!
● Techmoan's video on the Sony NT-2:
• The World's Smallest C...
● Download an archive of the drivers and software I've found:
archive.org/details/datasonix...
● LGR links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● Music used in order of appearance:
All Is Good Again 2, The Years We Had, Relaxation Station
www.epidemicsound.com 
Наука
To clarify the yen to dollar currency exchange at 05:24: I was basing what I said on a direct quote from Juan Rodriguez, who said in an interview that "the yen went from 110 down to 79." So I figured that saying "the value of the yen dropped" would get the point across, considering we're talking about the perspective of an American company dealing with Japanese suppliers. But yes, it should technically be that "the value of the yen strengthened." Apologies for the confusion.
archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2009/07/102702129-05-01-acc.pdf
Mate, with all your awesome gear you'll have a stockpile soon worthy of museum material. There wouldn't be many people in the world with a collection like yours. Love the videos mate. I'm 45 and was lucky enough to own a Pong (well dads Pong). Then went on to an Epson and played Zork 1 at around 10 years old. . I played that so much I got it down to being one move from being the best you could get. Must have opened the mailbox twice :0. Then an IBM XT. An AT 486 (with turbo). Lashed out and got an Adlib card ( should have gotten a soundblaster 16). We had a 30mb HDD. Dad partitioned it and had 20 and my brother and I had 5 each. Sooooo much space. haha My friend had an Amiga 500 at the same time and then a 2000. Best gaming machine in the world. Those graphics. That sound. Fast forward to today I'm rocking an i7 6 core and sli 1080s. Man. I dig your channel.
Isn't it funny the little things that jump out as sounding not-quite-right to a person? I had to pause the video because my brain latched on to that. Oh well, a great video either way. Thanks Clint!
Any clue why it didn't fit the 880mb backup in one cassette?
It is rather odd as it states that it can hold 650mb per side. I can only assume that the data is stored in chunks which have an enormous overheap which makes storing smaller files really inefficient.
I knew exactly what you meant, but then again I was heavily following the value of the yen to the dollar as a teenager as I anxiously awaited the often-delayed Nintendo64 US release, so I'm used to thinking about that particular ratio.
It makes me so happy that you, Techmoan, and 8-Bit guy are total bros.
Greg Bearringer I need an avengersesqe crossover with the three.
Yeah these guys are probably my 3 favourite channels. That and This Does Not Compute which does similar stuff to LGR
I can imagine the crossover's title:
The Audiovisuals
followed by:
The Audiovisuals: Muppet Mania
The Audiovisuals: Quest for Planet X
and finally:
The Audiovisuals: Age of Dongles
Mac Donalds 8-bit says he is geeky
And I recommend CuriousMarc
Two of my favorite retro creators in one!
0:52 1gb over Parallel port. Thats gonna take a bit of time
sbn025 I thought the same, I had a parallel port Zip 100 which was pretty much pointlessly slow for anything big.
People who use such an ancient port have lots of free time.
It's why ECP and EPP were invented, which this device supports. Much faster than standard parallel, which used the 8 output data bits, and 4 of the 5 error reporting bits as input. Interestingly the original IBM PC's parallel card supported bidirectional 8-bit data, even though later ones didn't. So you could shovel data in and out as fast as the CPU could read it, which wasn't very.
ECP and EPP were a desperate attempt to speed up the parallel port for all the non-printer devices that were using it. It was the fastest hole on PCs at the time, much faster than serial. Scanners and external hard drives, as well as lots of backup devices, used it.
This was about a year or two ahead of the invention of USB, designed with this problem in mind. Then because USB was so cheap and handy to interface to, people launched all sorts of stuff to plug into it.
6,4 mb/m yes minute :D 12:26 last line
It's fascinating how far miniature mechanical design could go before it is supplanted by something far more streamlined like SD cards.
Vinesauce Obscurities fancy seeing you here.
You know if for example you had some BTC keys you wanted to keep, well that would limit anyone taking them given the lack of devices out there
@@dcocz3908 It would also stop you from recovering your wallet when the reader breaks. When, not if.
It was probably the problem of reliability that killed it and how volatile this media was. Secur-disc came out soon after, and then SD cards. I think they recycled some of the technology and used it for digital still cameras and I know that some pocket size dictophones used it for a while.
Funny how much tape actually holds; VHS tapes are also helical scan, and the longest tapes, if recorded digitally would hold about 25 gigabytes. About the same as a blu-ray disk.
For that matter, there was a short-lived High Definition video tape format, that supported resolutions up to 1080i
Yeah... Tape can hold a LOT of data...
Indeed it can! Speaking of VHS I covered this thing a while back:
ruclips.net/video/TUS0Zv2APjU/видео.html
Believe it or not, tape is still the go-to backup/cold-storage medium if you have a lot of data. LTO-6 can put 2.5 TB of data on a $20 tape, and tape libraries allow you to scale this to thousands of cartridges. The only major competitor is Amazon Glacier, which uses a similar disc library system using BDXL media.
I remember that video. XD - I also remember ads for devices much like it from back in the day. Obviously not pushing things to extremes, but still quite impressive.
I'm honestly not surprised either, that tape is still a major backup format.
The capacity is just so huge due to sheer recording area. (think about how much magnetic media is in a tape then compare a floppy or hard disk's recording area.)
Just, unfortunately a bit inconvenient due to not being able to do random access...
Hah, I remember seeing those advertised in PC Plus magazine back in the day... Always wanted one, then I saw the review a few months later. "It's nice, but slow and a bit unreliable..."
*gently pats the LTO4 drive* :)
Techmoan actually covered this HD VHS format a while ago:
ruclips.net/video/jiu0LPeLQPE/видео.html
He also uploaded a demo tape that showcases its rather impressive image quality:
ruclips.net/video/fT4lDU-QLUY/видео.html
That’s a backup system I would have been really curious about back in the day. I used to waste hours of my life backing up to a mountain of floppies before CD-R became viable, so the idea of just stuffing everything on tape would have been perfect.
Storing stuff on tapes is one of the best domestic archival possibilities. I still use them a lot for backing up my Videos and masters on MiniDV tapes to make my backups a little more redundant. I don't really trust Harddrives or flash memory.
We went a really long time in the 90’s with hard drives much bigger than a floppy, but no commercially widespread way of transporting larger files or making drive backups using a reasonable number of disks. There’s a reason the Zip drive caught on, despite reliability issues.
This is one of the most interesting pieces of Oddware you've covered yet. I imagine this must have been pretty mindblowing from a technical POV back in the early 90s.
When LGR meets Techmoan...
I want the cross over.
I love that Jazzy Lounge Lizard intro music.... Very relaxing and comforting!
In 1994, 1GB on these small cassettes would've blew my mind.
It's so amazing that a tiny $20 microSD card today would destroy these things in terms of storage and speed.
5 years later, you can get that same card for $4.99 or less if you shop around
What is this? A backup system for ants?
It's for mice who want to back up their "Homework" folders
Ummmmmm........ I dunno
@@AlexS-sc3gb Probably contains some blueprints for fooling the farmer's cat.
I had no idea something like this even existed, very interesting oddware video once again!
I didn't either - they apparently didn't market it very well. And I was professionally in the market for mass backup systems at the time; I ran a software QA lab and ultimately went to removable hard drives to maintain my system images on. More expensive, but much faster.
I used one of these as an easy way to deploy software in the field back in the mid 90s. I had a fleet of Pentium 75 laptops that I supported and that it used batteries and not all laptops had a cd-rom, made it one of the most useful devices I have ever used. I wish I still had the thing. This video brings back a lot of good memories of one of my first jobs in IT.
I watched a medicine ad, just for you Clint
Get AdBlock.
@@Archangelm127 the whole point of him/her watching the entire ad just flew over your head.
Sreenikethan I smh am i right
---joke--->
O
/|\
/\
I illustrated it
I use 2 adblocker lol
Holy crap, a Techmoan cameo AND a mention of Esperanto!
How you can get verified?
You only have 1 subscriber and no content at all.
>verified channel
>no content whatsoever and only 1 subscriber
Wait that's illegal
Probably a company channel with unlisted videos and hiding the subscriber count that’s just what I’m assuming
@@LamarINH I doubt that's the case.
If subscriber count is opted to be hidden, it should not showing any sub count at all.
The Hoodie Guy it doesn’t show a sub count for me
Vintage SD cards :^)
SD tapes ;)
That is some Techmoan stuff
I though it was one of his videos untill i clicked and saw oddware
do thet yes!!!!!!!!!!!!
If one Rodrigez could do this imagine what two could acomplish!
How many Rodriguezes does it take to change a lightbulb?
@@greenaum Juan?
Puns are Juanderful aren't they
Aidan Chappelle haha
As soon as I saw that tiny tape I was like "I wonder if he's gonna mention the Techmoan video"? And 5 seconds later he did! YAY!
Wow that's insane. I bought a Ditto Travan-style tape backup in 1995 I believe, for somewhere around $150 and it was only 200mb uncompressed and 400mb compressed. I had no idea something of this size both of digital capacity and physicality, even existed at the time. I wonder if these ever made an appearance in a Computer Shopper catalog?
Remembering my Ditto dash, somewhat more capacity - and having to dremel the front chassis of my case to accommodate an out of 3 1/2" form factor bulge in the drive.
Oh boy, that was my favourite case, desktop, AT form factor, and it was fully loaded....
The Ditto and the 3 1/2" floppy occupied the two vertical front 3 1/2".
5 1/4" Floppy (for bargain software in that size), CD-ROM & CD-RW occupied the 3x 5 1/4" bays.
Two hard drives occupied the internal bays that hung on the side of the PSU.
To access the memory slots, ALL the bay assemblies had to be dismounted, though the cables allowed them to be flipped to the sides - that case had character!
sounds like a missed marketing opportunity killed the company, as its a none tracking mechanism it would have been vastly better than the cheaper Travan tape... most people forget or didn't realise Travan tapes would only be guaranteed work if restored by same drive that did the backup, if the tracking/head alinement wasn't close enough then another unit wouldn't be able to read the tape... this unit seems much better than similarly priced alternatives up until millennium ... DAT/DDS-1 units were around $1000 @ 2GB compressed
"Founded by Juan Rodriguez"
I honestly thought you were introducing him as "One 'Rodriguez' ", as though that were some sort of assumed name or title.
I am very proud that the founder is hispanic like me.
It’s “Neo Rodriguez”
After a long week of work and school, LGR is the best way to decompress on a Friday! Thank you!
I just hope this furthers the LGR/Techmoan expanded universe
LGR/Techmoan/8-bit Guy
AvE/CodysLab
@@Da40kOrks /Technology Connections
You don’t even know how much I would love to have a Sony NT player.
Wow, that's quite the spectacle! Didn't know they did data on that format.
If you see a magnetic tape format that came out sometime after 1975, somebody somewhere has figured out a way to store digital data on it.
Thanks for this video! The fact that this video features my top 2 favourite RUclips-ers is super awesome.
Thank you for having closed captions, most youtubers I watch only have it on automated which can make for clunky viewing with a mix of language processing issues and not having the time to replay segments/vids over and over to process something correctly.
Eyyy a colab with Techmoan. This pleases me greatly.
sagepone Yes password
the small / mini sized technology is sooo cute!!
🌟very kawaii🌟
almost as cute as you
But not as cute as me! ^.=.^
Azrial Alaria your cuter ❤
MrFoxyCracker awe thank you ❤
Techmoan!
I used that jet pilot guy as my facebook profile picture for years. good taste.
It's fun when the people involved in older tech are still around. I wonder if Juan would get a kick out of the video.
In the 90s when i went over to a friend, i just dismounted the drive, put it in an ESD bag and a shock absorbing box.
For me it was more Mountainbike-net :o)
We took the whole friggin computer. LAN party!!! Spent 3 hours getting all set up and configured, then played Doom for an hour. :-)
Techmoan... Clint's Internet dad
I must say I find your videos fascinating and entertaining. Your rich baritone voice is both soothing and informative as well ;)
You deserve a like just for that techmoan feature! I demand more collaborations from you two!
Like that imitation Apple Garamond Condensed font on the cover of the box. Nothing like creating positive associations with your new product...
My first thought too
Yeah, because of the font I was expecting this to be an Apple product xD
I spoke to soon! After watching the whole video, it was clear that the whole box has an "Apple vibe" to it. :-)
That was very common at the time. You'd see it on all the ads in the trade publications, too, no matter what product was being hawked. Even IBM got in on it. It's weird how looking at a friggin' font can make me nostalgic. :-)
Haha, so I wasn't the only one to notice, then.
Now I know Techmoan name is Matt.
i aways thought his name was Dave
It's a British thing. They take the extra T off the end of Matt in exchange for adding an S on the end of math.
He explained in one of his past videos that it all started with the "high score" section of arcade machines only allowing a maximum of 3 characters, so he started using "MAT" for listing his name, and it kinda caught on.
We mainly spell it Matt too in UK
I just love how in depth you go with these videos, Clint. You leave every question fulfilled!
Awesome Techmoan shout out. Love hearing that dude talk about electronics. Big fan of yours as well. Keep it up man.
My two favorite RUclipsrs
Thats a some freaking good video!
That was indeed a pretty impressive amount of storage back then, especially on something so tiny! Great video!
I've been watching a ton of your videos lately and this has easily become one of my favorite RUclips channels, so it's that much more awesome to see (well, hear) a guest appearance from Techmoan, one of my other favorite channels! Good stuff.
1GB via parallel port, LOL.
Hmmmmm, adorable keychain that doubles as storage?
Man. Your channel is just nostalgia heaven. I’m so glad I’ve followed you all these years.
This has made made my day in so many ways. It's superb for so many reasons. And that's even though after watching so many videos on this channel I know I can expect something I'll like. Thanks, Clint! (and Matt, of course ;) ).
Pretty damn high capacity for the time, curious about reliability though, which would've been a legit concern. Great video, as always!
its like a old sd card
I particularly enjoy that you record the sounds
Techmoan + LGR, my circuits are getting warm...
If this connected over something faster than parallel, then I would totally have brought into these back in the day. I mean, now, it’s worthless as a gigabyte is nothing, but back in the era when 100mb Iomega Zip Disks we’re significantly large and more expensive, then I would’ve happily used this for my archive storage! That’s amazing for the era!
I’m considering setting up a modern-day magnetic tape backup system for my current PC though, as I need more storage space. It’s not as desperate as my storage situation was the other day, as I deleted 600gb of Top Gear episodes that I downloaded ages ago, but when I redownload all of that I need something to put that in, and my hard drives won’t fit it. I hear modern tape systems can store terabytes of data though, which is good for me as I don’t mind the speed.
Awesome to see channels I already follow doing collabs... xD
Anyways, great find! Guess it's also very impressive for the time. I mean, wow, 1Gb of storage back in 94 was pretty amazing...
I love you for providing us with this wonderful content and I hate you for providing me with a such painfully intense feelings of nostalgia for the things I didn't even know existed.
Thank you.
Dude... that’s really cool! I’ve never seen those little tapes. Great job as always Clint!
Woah this is neat
Insane how different data storage changes. 1GB was amazing, now 12,000 GB is amazing
Insane that those 12TB are also on tape - LTO-8.
@aussiebear22*so now i have to steal one.*
And now you can get 1TB of storage on micro SD cards smaller then a fingernail.
1GB is still amazing.
12,000gb really isn't that amazing. I have more storage space in my mid-range gaming PC from 2015.
TECHMOAN!!! I enjoyed this very much, and the cameo was a nice bonus. Cute little tape device.
I were impressed, could able to listen the voice of Techmoan on LGR channel!
I remember having a gateway.
The Cow Cube is still wierd.
Not exactly UI design experts, those guys. ;-) But they got the "large serif font on a box" packaging theme of the 90s down though.
Really neat product. I can't help but think this might have had a chance if it had been marketed better. I've never heard of it. I was pining over a 3.5" Ditto 200MB tape drive back then. 1GB would have blown my little mind. That would have been a great platform to back up a small LAN server for businesses that had jumped into networking, but didn't have full IT departments yet.
Really cool to see some history local to where I live. I grew up near the storage tech facility and was always fascinated by it. Sadly it was demolished a few years ago. Thanks for the video!
Two of my favourite retro gadget youtubers voice in one video? Niiiiiiicceeeee.
I want to see a modern spy movie use one of these
But faster, and without having to install software. It would be awfully inconvenient if a spy had to break into someone's office, hook up the Pereos, install the software, and then sit there and wait for 3 hours while the contents of the hard drive were saved to tape, then uninstall the software to cover their tracks. ;)
True, ooooor
The spy breaks in, and now they have to defend the room while the slow loading process begins. Guns blazing as he's going from room to room with a laptop hooked up to it. Then the protag and love interest would have a conversation about how inconvenient it is and one of them saying "It's so stupid I guess thats why no one else thought of it"
My wife:
Are you seriously watching a video of a guy saving files onto an old cassette tape that nobody remembers or cares about from the 90's?
Me:
Uh...Yeah?
My wife:
Let me bring the popcorn
Me:
I just re-fell in love!
You lying bastard.
Video is gonna be over before the popcorn is all popped tho lol
Boink & No Boink Worth watching another time, though.
Now that's a keeper right there
Bullshit.
Love that you had Techmoan read the quote! :)
DUDE! I love it so much that you're mentioning some of my other favorite you tubers!! Please keep the collabs, so too speak, up!
new camera? your videos looking nice and crjsp
Thanks! Yep I started using a Lumix GH5 a couple months back.
it shows :) looks good on a mobile
@@LGR your video looks super crjsp
Techmoan voice-over 😂😂😂😂😂
I was eagerly waiting for that Techmoan mention, wasn't disappointed.
The software portion of the video was incredibly fascinating (the whole video is on a different level!)
Looks like a tape from a sound wave figure from the original transformers.
+luke yami I had both Laserbeak and Ravage back in the day (the mid 1980s) and they were based on Microcassettes, which are actually a bit bigger!
Thats cool.
It's so cute
Man, it's cool to see you and Techmoan doing a collab.
Loved how you used Techmoan's audio.......you're both on my Subscription list!!!
LGR, if the smallest cassette in the world holds 1.25 gigs of data , how much data can I get on a 8 track mate?
Don’t freakin move
Modern LTO cartridge is capable of up to 9 TB of uncompressed data. Tape storage is still widely used for large data archiving. Very cheap for storing large cold data.
Wait!! One question; what would it sound like if you put it in a tape player?
I don't have an NT audio player so I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly. But if it's like any other audio cassette storage, it probably sounds something like this: ruclips.net/video/wVsY9PVIKsQ/видео.html
LGR Ahh, gotta love those dial up-esque data sounds!
Why are your videos so satisifying and interesting
I came here from an Issac Arthur video into an LGR / techmoan combo.
Some days, youtube, you spoil us. Great episode.
In 1994, I am not sure if I knew what an Gigabyte was, an Gigabyte then was amazing. For those that copied stuff on Diskettes this would have been a nice solution, but yeah, insanely expensive for just your average Nerd! :D I remember POD came, and before it came it was all this MMX hype and proraganda about how good it was and POD was made for MMX graphics, I think Unreal also was "MMX optimized". Man, I remember reading about Unreal and seeing screenshots, it took so long time for it to come. I never got to play it actually!
And now I have 512GB on the tip of my thumb...
I have seen a bunch of your videos and this is the first time I have ever actually seen what you look like
This was amazing. thank you for putting this together!
you need to backp onto vhs tape.. now thats future.
Guess you missed this one?
ruclips.net/video/TUS0Zv2APjU/видео.html
ah sorry. ;)
any techie worth a damn knows tape is the superior data storage format if you want to stay future-proof!
That's a joke, right? If not, you should really look up tape degradation. You never know with RUclips comments, and the humour behind text is harder to decipher then a tone of voice. :P
@ Anne-Marie Rose: Exactly! That's also why Videotapes are still very much alive and well in the professional broadcast business. Stuff from tapes can always be dumped to a media server or other format but once you put it back into the archive, it surely outlives every flash memory or USB HDD.
KRAFTWERK2K6 Tape degradation is a thing unless you have a really good way to atore them
Good tapes still last a long time. Proper storage conditions apply to any media, but SSDs will degrade even then. Irony is, these days something pro but basic like an LTO1 is dirt cheap. I never quite understood why the tech industry didn't bother going after the consumer data backup market. Instead, most home users have absolutely no idea about backup at all, most don't even imagine the key storage device in their system could go wrong.
I follow both you and Techmoan. This is like the oddware crossover issue I've been waiting for.
Man that voice, so soothing I could fall asleep to these. I love your videos man. New glasses as well? Looking great Clint!
What happened to the 1Gb of storage per tape if it couldn't even manage 800Mb?
markanne54 I'm curious about that too. I'm guessing either a hardware fault leading to ineffective tape usage, or possibly they were quoting the higher value with the expectation of better data compression ratios than he got for his files. Or both.
Maybe with more compression in the best case scenario
Almost all tape backup solutions quoted compressed size. It was probably expected to 1GB compressed at 2:1. He was only able to get 1.37:1 compression thus the need for a second tape. This is common among tape data compression.
Could be the way the tape drive stores sectors and such, there could be some wasted space. It would be interesting to see backing up a single 1gb file rather than tons of small ones.
I wouldn't be surprised if Windows got the disk size wrong :-)
God I love LGR Oddware! So cool to see all this quirky tech that people used before my time (I was born in 2002) 😂
I was born in 77, I just want to say that I'm old. Thank you.
Daniel Jones I was born in 98 and these videos make me sk glad I wasn't born earlier
The Stig's German Cousin >before my time
Rip me
I thought I was subscribed...nope. I love your channel and I've watched it for years.
Such a great episode. Strange repurposed audio hardware recording an old pic game, Techmoan, great videography. This has it all. :)
This would be perfect for a functional pipboy.
That would be amazing. Now all we need is a miniature CRT or plasma display.
Swift Fox A CRT of the right size would be heavy and deep, though. I use to have a little portable TV with about the right dimensions, but it was nearly a cube, thanks to the length of the tube.
LairdDeimos I cringe imagining the surgery one would need to have to fit a CRT tube onto their arm. That might explain why the Brotherhood of Steel Outcasts had trouble taking off a Pip-Boy from Gary - they didn't know it wasn't just an average wrist-mounted device ;)
And yeah, iirc CRTs are super heavy, but I have no idea how much a small CRT like we are talking about here would weigh, nor how would that weight feel on the arm.
I have actually seen plasma displays on early luggable computers, those might be good enough for a Pip-Boy. They were pretty shallow and still have the retro feel that LCDs don't quite have.
Swift Fox the little telly I had weighed 4 pounds without the 4 d cells. Not impossible, but it would be awkward.
Will Perish LOL What were they thinking
They were thinking that only about a dozen people speak Esperanto so who cares?
Good job on getting past 800k+ subscribers.
I love Techmoan, so it's a treat to hear you two coperate :)
Who else squeeed when Techmoan's voice came up in the video?
I did sneeze at around 3:20...
how the actual hell did they do that !
A cassette can barely hold an album.. yet this tiny thing can hold 1.25GB ! just wow...
GoatDotExe the merits of using helical scan over linear scanning
GoatDotExe FUUUUUTURE
What? Most music albums are around 40 to 60 minutes in length. Most audio cassettes are between 60 and 120 minutes in length. Often you can fit two entire albums on one cassette, one on each side of the tape.
Well, it can't. As you saw he had to insert a second tape to fully backup the 800MB disk.
That means the real capacity is lower than that.
The 1.25GB is just an advertisement trick. You have seen that it compresses the data. So for well compressable data you can stuff more into it, that's all.
The word processor documents, spreadsheets, databases, etc. that the intended business users would be storing on the tape would compress much more easily than the media and program files Clint put on it, so in real-world use, the Pereos probably did meet its advertised capacity most of the time.
Gratz on 800K subs.
Nice Techmoan cameo! Love it!