Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Press Play on Tape (Bandersnatch) - Computerphile" video.
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It’s no coincidence that the sound is so similar to that made by telephone modems, since they are both trying to solve nearly identical problems, namely how to use a medium designed for audio to transfer digital data.
The obvious differences being:
* Modems can ask for a retransmit when they hit an error, whereas the cassette player cannot be stopped and rewound to replay a section under computer control (unlike the tape drives on the bigger computers of the time, for example).
* But on the other hand, even cheap audiocassette machines would be capable of better frequency response than the 4kHz standard bandwidth for telephone lines.
Another thing is, modem coding technology continued to progress a lot after the days of using audiocassettes for data, reaching a peak of a 33.6kb/s transfer rate in either direction before being eclipsed by broadband technologies like ADSL. If similar trellis-coding techniques were retrofitted onto cassette encoding, it should be possible to load a program of, say, 128kB size in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. Or would that take more processing power than an authentic 8-bit machine could manage?
And another thing to look at might be the incorporation of robust error-correction codes, like that on CDs and DVDs. But again, maybe this would require too much additional hardware or processing power to fit within the authentic 8-bit experience ...
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