"Historical computer backup systems (like ArVid) or audio formats (like Alesis ADAT) used standard VHS cassettes to store around 2 GB of digital computer data" (quote is not from the article)
It’s cool that the ArVid system has been ”rediscovered” in recent years. It seemed to be completely lost and forgotten about for a long time, despite my clear memories of seeing an ad for a system for VHS backups in a magazine in the late 90s.
Our computer had an 850MB hard drive at the time, 2GB of storage on a single tape was enormous and it really stuck in my mind.
I had the Gargoyles Movie in on VHS a version my mom bought came with a whole table top type game or something, and the movie allowed you to play a tabletop game with a VCR game it came with, I dont rememver if I even had a VCR so I don't remember if I played it or not. I just know she got it at a garage sale, and I watched Gargoyles religiously.
In 2026, everything is a stream of numbers. It's obvious everything is a stream of numbers. We can save them to disk and stream them over the internet and archive them and it it were't for DRM and hostile practices we could stick them all in the same place right next to each other in the same directory.
In let's say 1996, we weren't remotely there yet. A radio program was distinct from a television program was distinct from a book was distinct from a CD was distinct from a CD-ROM was distinct from a video game... and so on and so forth. You had a tool for recording from the TV, the VCR, but that didn't do the radio. You had a tool for that, which was a cassette tape, but that didn't do anything else. Except for certain early computers who took advantage of the fact that a cassette tape is really just a recording of varying voltages which can be fed into a computer to be interpreted as numbers, but this is one of the rare exceptions where there was some crossover, and by the 1990s this was gone anyhow. Now you had floppy disks, which were for computers, and they didn't store movies or books or radio shows, they just stored computer programs.
Everything was compartmentalized so the idea of "storing a computer backup on a VHS tape" sounded like some sort of forbidden union.
What sort of fascinates me about this history is how so much of it is written into the law now. We have all these different laws where music is treated this way, but movies are treated that way, and books are treated some other way, and so on and so forth. Copyright law isn't quite entirely broken up into unrelated fiefdoms but neither is it anywhere near as unified as it would be if it was a brand new idea someone was coming up with today. And it still has trouble dealing with the concept of things like "databases" sometimes.
Now it's not such a weird idea that a VCR tape is really just a stream of numbers to be sliced and diced as needed for a project like this. But back then, so much of the processing involved fundementally analog processes that anything that crossed the streams seemed like magic. I don't feel like I've conveyed the idea properly that this wasn't just a technical thing, I'm talking about how people thought about these things. It was a revelation at the time that CDs could contain "video". It was a revelation that you could have "an MP3 player" that had "computer files", but, but, it played music. You could store backups on a CD. You could put a book... on a computer. I remember the first time I realized that if I took these cables from the VCR and fed them in to the input of my cassette player I could record the audio off a VCR on to a tape, the point being not that this was impossible but that it was something I had to realize. We had all these categories in our minds with strict boundaries between them that don't exist anymore, because those categories are just accidents of history.
What we have today is much closer to reality... it's all just numbers. Any numbers can go on to number storage devices. Any numbers can be streamed across the number delivery service. The tech industry is in fact busily trying to re-establish the boundaries they themselves erased so they can artificially segment the various markets again.
It's fun to see an old-school boundary breaker project again.
When I realized I could store/view plain text files on my ipod nano, I used it as a mini database to cheat on my highschool law tests. Good times. Your comment made me remember that, thanks man.
Well a VHS tape isn't normally a stream of numbers, it's an analog video signal (with low-resolution chroma merged in). You can turn it into a digital signal if you really want to, there were some consumer ISA cards that let you perform tape backups onto VHS, claiming a whopping 4GB of storage on tape.
Traditionally everything was a frequency. While it's obvious everything is a number it's also obvious everything has a frequency. Digital images have (spatial) harmonics and frequencies just like their analog counterparts. Some compression techniques like JPEG are based on that.
The sampling theorem tells us that the continuous and quantized interpretations are actually the same. Not in a metaphorical sense but very literally the same: they describe the same thing with different equations. One with the language of sets and the other with the language of continuous functions.
I recently skimmed [0] Radio-Facsimile subtitled "An Assemblage of Papers from Engineers of the RCA Laboratories Relating to the Radio Transmission and Recorded Reception of Permanent Images" from the 1930s and it was surprising to me what a solid understanding of information theory they had back then. There's no formal theory but many already had intuition:
> Let us assume that we wish five tone values to each of these dots, we may then describe this, arbitrarily, as requiring five photo units for each of these dots, or some 20,000 photo units to the square inch.
i.e. a 5-level greyscale bitmap encoded one-hot requires 20,000 bits per square inch to faithfully describe
the selection of 5 bits is not a coincidence it aligns with the standard 5-bit Baudot "byte" of the era used by tape and telegraphy equipment
> On high-class telephone circuits we can readily send 200 such photo units in a second; but in the usual telegraph circuits such speeds are quite difficult, the fastest usual speeds being some 75 separate pulses a second [...]
because you might want to send a picture over the telephone or even by telex
We spent decades breaking down the barriers between different media formats, only for companies to spend the next decade putting them back up with DRM and proprietary ecosystems
The element of limited choice between multiple tracks makes me think of the Viewmaster Interactive Vision which implemented a much more limited version of the concept.
What I’ve wanted to see is for someone to stuff the recording hardware from a VCR and a raspberry pi into a VHS cassette to constantly write new video to a tiny loop of tape.
Kind of like those 3.5mm to audio cassette adapters for old car stereos.
One idea I’ve had related to storing digital data on tape is to make a mp3 cassette tape. So you could have something in like a walkman form factor, and put actual tape in it, but it’d store digit mp3 audio. Completely impractical but it’d be a great mashup of old and new(-ish)
old digital tape standards could store like 1.2Kb (not even kilo-bytes), but I wonder if with modern dsp techniques we could get it higher.
My napkin math says if tape has a bandwidth of about 10khz, and you could sample the tape with a 8bit dac at 10khz, then that would be 10KB/s, or about 36MB for a 60 minute tape, enough to store like maybe 10 minutes of medium quality music. If you dropped the bitrate of the mp3 down to 10KB/s then you’d even get the full 1 hour play time (I just hope you don’t like cymbals)
yeah something like that, but then with a custom portable walkman clone style player for playback, probably with a esp32 or something to handle the decoding.
I had the Action Max they featured here. It was...terrible.
Based on the timing, I'm deeply surprised it came out 2 years after the NES was released in the US, but I suspect it was way cheaper, and bought by some number of clueless parents.
> What makes this interesting to me isn't the prospect of abandoning modern consoles in favour of a VCR. It's the attempt to revisit a peculiar dead end in gaming history and imagine what might have happened if somebody had taken the concept a little further.
I agree, as the hardware of consoles etc. back then would have been perfectly capable of doing something like this (I think; haven't watched the video yet but I am pretty sure I understood the concept). It's almost a bit like a physical representation of an "alternate technical history" story.
It uses two different ideas. One game is eight parallel plotlines apparently running on eight tracks of the tape and the interactivity is switching between them. The other is using the content from the tape as a background with a traditional video game overlayed.
It is based on older work from the heyday of VHS where the tape provided to background and the game was a lightgun with a hit counter.
Since it's essentially running on a custom VCR, couldn't you put the actual game on the VHS tape? EG put a series of QR codes as frames that store the binary executable data (You could do something more clever but you get the concept). Video is gigantic, filesize-wise, and I'm sure you could store the data for DOOM in the same space.
If you wanted it to still play normally in a standard VCR (like it plays a recording of gameplay in a normal VCR, but loads the actual game in the custom vcr), you could store the data in the parts of the signal outside the normally rendered frame, like how captions are stored off the bottom of the screen. There's quite a few lines there that could be taken advantage of
You could store it at a higher bandwidth than the cassette tapes that games came on back then, particularly in the UK and Europe. So have the first 4 minutes of the tape be the game loader, as code, stored in one of the analog / digital formats in use back then.
Yeah, you can take advantage of the increased data rate of video, but you'd have to be careful about the distortion that comes with VHS, so you couldn't just convert each three bytes to a pixel of colour and run them all together in a video. QR codes was just an example familiar to the layperson, you could probably use much more data dense systems given you know know exactly where the data is going to be, but it would be very headache-inducing to watch, unless you made 1-frame datablasts or similar
31 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 30.9 ms ] threadI had no idea! Cool project
Our computer had an 850MB hard drive at the time, 2GB of storage on a single tape was enormous and it really stuck in my mind.
In let's say 1996, we weren't remotely there yet. A radio program was distinct from a television program was distinct from a book was distinct from a CD was distinct from a CD-ROM was distinct from a video game... and so on and so forth. You had a tool for recording from the TV, the VCR, but that didn't do the radio. You had a tool for that, which was a cassette tape, but that didn't do anything else. Except for certain early computers who took advantage of the fact that a cassette tape is really just a recording of varying voltages which can be fed into a computer to be interpreted as numbers, but this is one of the rare exceptions where there was some crossover, and by the 1990s this was gone anyhow. Now you had floppy disks, which were for computers, and they didn't store movies or books or radio shows, they just stored computer programs.
Everything was compartmentalized so the idea of "storing a computer backup on a VHS tape" sounded like some sort of forbidden union.
What sort of fascinates me about this history is how so much of it is written into the law now. We have all these different laws where music is treated this way, but movies are treated that way, and books are treated some other way, and so on and so forth. Copyright law isn't quite entirely broken up into unrelated fiefdoms but neither is it anywhere near as unified as it would be if it was a brand new idea someone was coming up with today. And it still has trouble dealing with the concept of things like "databases" sometimes.
Now it's not such a weird idea that a VCR tape is really just a stream of numbers to be sliced and diced as needed for a project like this. But back then, so much of the processing involved fundementally analog processes that anything that crossed the streams seemed like magic. I don't feel like I've conveyed the idea properly that this wasn't just a technical thing, I'm talking about how people thought about these things. It was a revelation at the time that CDs could contain "video". It was a revelation that you could have "an MP3 player" that had "computer files", but, but, it played music. You could store backups on a CD. You could put a book... on a computer. I remember the first time I realized that if I took these cables from the VCR and fed them in to the input of my cassette player I could record the audio off a VCR on to a tape, the point being not that this was impossible but that it was something I had to realize. We had all these categories in our minds with strict boundaries between them that don't exist anymore, because those categories are just accidents of history.
What we have today is much closer to reality... it's all just numbers. Any numbers can go on to number storage devices. Any numbers can be streamed across the number delivery service. The tech industry is in fact busily trying to re-establish the boundaries they themselves erased so they can artificially segment the various markets again.
It's fun to see an old-school boundary breaker project again.
and yet it was a real product in 1993: Video Backup System Amiga
http://hugolyppens.com/VBS.html
https://github.com/hugo-lyppens/VideoBackupSystem
The sampling theorem tells us that the continuous and quantized interpretations are actually the same. Not in a metaphorical sense but very literally the same: they describe the same thing with different equations. One with the language of sets and the other with the language of continuous functions.
I recently skimmed [0] Radio-Facsimile subtitled "An Assemblage of Papers from Engineers of the RCA Laboratories Relating to the Radio Transmission and Recorded Reception of Permanent Images" from the 1930s and it was surprising to me what a solid understanding of information theory they had back then. There's no formal theory but many already had intuition:
> Let us assume that we wish five tone values to each of these dots, we may then describe this, arbitrarily, as requiring five photo units for each of these dots, or some 20,000 photo units to the square inch.
i.e. a 5-level greyscale bitmap encoded one-hot requires 20,000 bits per square inch to faithfully describe
the selection of 5 bits is not a coincidence it aligns with the standard 5-bit Baudot "byte" of the era used by tape and telegraphy equipment
> On high-class telephone circuits we can readily send 200 such photo units in a second; but in the usual telegraph circuits such speeds are quite difficult, the fastest usual speeds being some 75 separate pulses a second [...]
because you might want to send a picture over the telephone or even by telex
[0] https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Technology/R...
Kind of like those 3.5mm to audio cassette adapters for old car stereos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Lair_(1983_video_game...
old digital tape standards could store like 1.2Kb (not even kilo-bytes), but I wonder if with modern dsp techniques we could get it higher.
My napkin math says if tape has a bandwidth of about 10khz, and you could sample the tape with a 8bit dac at 10khz, then that would be 10KB/s, or about 36MB for a 60 minute tape, enough to store like maybe 10 minutes of medium quality music. If you dropped the bitrate of the mp3 down to 10KB/s then you’d even get the full 1 hour play time (I just hope you don’t like cymbals)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D/CAS
Based on the timing, I'm deeply surprised it came out 2 years after the NES was released in the US, but I suspect it was way cheaper, and bought by some number of clueless parents.
I agree, as the hardware of consoles etc. back then would have been perfectly capable of doing something like this (I think; haven't watched the video yet but I am pretty sure I understood the concept). It's almost a bit like a physical representation of an "alternate technical history" story.
It uses two different ideas. One game is eight parallel plotlines apparently running on eight tracks of the tape and the interactivity is switching between them. The other is using the content from the tape as a background with a traditional video game overlayed.
It is based on older work from the heyday of VHS where the tape provided to background and the game was a lightgun with a hit counter.
If you wanted it to still play normally in a standard VCR (like it plays a recording of gameplay in a normal VCR, but loads the actual game in the custom vcr), you could store the data in the parts of the signal outside the normally rendered frame, like how captions are stored off the bottom of the screen. There's quite a few lines there that could be taken advantage of
See for example the Kansas City Standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_standard
And of course the sound output is "headache inducing", albeit loved by people of the era:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0qQRVg_98M