So I have been at work moving all of our shit out because we

>data tapes

Excellent chance of trolling newfags, OP.

Can I suggest you invest in a BIC ball point pen (biro to the British) and FFWD that shit. Guaranteed side A is used and side B is not

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>>60799979
*Cassettes
Sorry fella.
Here is a pic if the actual haul.

No probs, pal. They're worth Jack Shit: I notice eba has a higher quality tape deck for about thirty-five quid (50 dollars US) but realisitically, what can be copied to them?

I'm actually an ancientfag being 49yo. I didn't use r300s, but I did use c15 and c90s, and and c15 could store slightly more than 48,000 bytes.

You could possibly sell them to audio fags for the same reason you can sell melted vinyl to them.

>>60800157
Thanks for the info. As I said in the op, I am going to be giving them to a friend who loves collecting, and using old shit, and really just wanted to know if I should tell him to not open them.

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>>60800263

He can go right ahead and open them if he likes, they weren't poisonous or anything.

To answer your question, they were indeed rare, back then. R tapes are of much higher quality than C tapes but were quickly superceded by DAT tapes. So they were forgotten quickly, too. It occurs to me that museums might be interested in them.

The c tapes were named after how long they ran, so a c15 tape would take 15 minutes to play through. That is, your 48,000 bytes would take just under 15 minutes to back up. I couldn't say if R300 means 300 minutes - they actually look like C90 tapes through the window - but the higher quality and a slower play speed might mean that your R300 tapes could store 960,000 bytes of data. A floopy disk could store approx 1,440,000 bytes of data - 1.4mb.

I also notice the notches in the cassette just above the "m" in "Verbatim". Those were not found on c cassettes, so I'll guess that indicated to the hardware that this was a data tape, not just Johnny's mixtape.

Anyway, history lesson over. That's a great find there, and I hope you're friend can do something with them!

>>60799953
Just a nifty relic of the past. If your friend is into collecting these things, he probably knows enough to not open them if they're of any value.
If he absolutely needed to write to cassette, he can pretty much use any audiotape off the shelf.

>>60800387
Awesome! Like I had said, I found them in old surveying equipment. I do dredging and what they would have been used for was recording data of the depth in real time, I assume with lasers, as that was the norm in the 80s. Basically, boat shoots beam to the bottom, calculates how long it takes to hit back, and makes a chart. I don't know if that gives you an idea of write speed or data size, but that was most likely what they where used for

>>60800486
He does. I don't know enough about it to say if he "needs" them or not, but I do know that he uses audio tapes all the time.

>>60800387
>disk could store approx 1,440,000 bytes of data - 1.4mb
Incorrect. PC-formatted floppies hold 1,440 kiB = 1,474,560 bytes, about 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB.

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>>60800525

Lasers for that use in the 80s would have been incredible - remember that compact disks use lasers, and they didn't really come out until the 80s, so they would have been big, heavy devices!

One was used aboard an aircraft in the 70s, according to Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_airborne_depth_sounder, which reports it could take just under 1000 soundings per second, back then. We can guess if these tapes were used ... the height above sea level can be thrown away, but the depth from sea level to ocean floor would be kept. If we make a reasonable set of assumptions, they would also have stored the time the sounding was taken. Both of these would be 16bit numbers, meaning an individual tape would store 960,000/4 = 240,000 soundings or - just over 4 minutes of data. That doesn't seem likely, as tape was very susceptible to damage even being spooled at normal speed. We would have to guess that if they stored live data, they checked less often (53 times a second would fit) or of they stored at full speed that was only after the data was held in extremely expensive - and heavy - disk or RAM until the tape could spool forward.

>60800630
>I don't understand "approx"
You will one day, don't worry

>>60800748
That actually makes sense because back in the day, they would only sound every 50 foot cut line and cuts where 30 foot wide. Roughly giving you 10 or so soundings every 50 feet

>>60800846
*1000 soundings every 50 feet