It made me wonder if they were really off-the-shelf commercially available tapes, or were they specially produced for the Tornado? If they were standard how did they prevent the tape snagging or tearing, I remember how easily this could occur and its not really something you want to happen when on a mission.
Cassette tapes were pretty commonly used for data / program storage with consumer PCs in the early 1980s. When I first took a computer programming course in high school in 1983, we were working on Radio Shack TRS-80s, and we had to save our programming assignments on standard cassettes, which were loaded back into the computer via a “cassette drive,” which was, for all intents and purposes, a consumer cassette player. This is pretty much what the setup looked like. By that point in time, floppy disks (the 5 1/4" kind) were increasingly being used for microcomputers, and cassette drives were on their way out, as I remember it.
And, yes, that looks exactly like a standard cassette that’s being used in the Tornado video. I have no idea if they had a better-than-normal cassette that they used, or not.
That’s definitely a standard cassette form-factor.
There were special cassettes available back then that were marketed as “computer grade” or “data” type tapes. Anything purchased for military use has to go through ungodly quality control stuff (which is why they joke about $200 hammers), so it’s pretty much guaranteed that they weren’t just hopping down to the local 5 and dime and buying the el-cheapo cassettes off of the shelf.
As for snagging and tearing, that actually wasn’t much of a problem back in the day, with the caveat that you had to use decent equipment. Most cassette-eating problems were actually caused by cheap equipment, not by the tape itself. Cheap rollers with crappy rubber and weak capstan motors on the take-up reel were the main culprits. If you had a decent quality cassette deck, it would pretty much never eat a tape.
While the military probably went to a cassette manufacturer and ordered a special batch of tapes that went through some sort of official quality control procedure, what we personally found out back in the TRS-80 days was that the el-cheapo off-the-shelf tapes usually worked better and were more reliable than both the higher quality tapes (like Memorex, before Memorex started making cheap and crappy cassettes) or the even more expensive cassettes marketed for computer use. Literally, the cheapest tapes we could find were the most reliable from a data loss point of view.
As for stuff still being used today, you’d be amazed what is still running out there. It often costs an ungodly sum of money to re-create some sort of custom system for a one-off design. Often the original documentation has been lost, and an engineer or software designer will have to first spend a huge amount of time spinning up on how the system is supposed to work. And then they have to design a new system using modern technology to do the same thing. If you are making a bizillion of the things, then the engineering cost gets spread out and it’s no biggie, but if it’s a one-off system, you could literally spend several hundred thousand dollars just to port some specialized machine over to modern technology. This is why they often keep incredibly antiquated systems still running for as long as they can. I would be very surprised if there wasn’t some sort of old system that was still loading data from a cassette tape out there somewhere.
But they did get supplied a special mil-spec end-tapered demagnetised and gegaussed timber rod, 9mm diameter, with a reinforced graphite core and rubber safety terminal buffer that allowed the tape to be rewound, even when excessive G-forces subjected the entire airframe to critical stress. Reputedly they cost more than U$2,500 each but were available colour-coded for different combat situations.
Or rather, it might have been tapes from the exact same production line as the ones at the five and dime, but only if the company had put them through the military quality-control process. Any that didn’t pass quality control could probably still be sold for civilian use.
In the video, the waypoints are calculated on land by a computer that uses a floppy disc (8-inch, I think, at 4:32) and a, uh, mouse (at 6:36), then saved onto a cassette (at 6:56). The plane’s crew then boards the Tornado and loads the cassette into the plane’s navigation system at 11:56.
If they were just transferring navigation coordinates into the planes computer there is no real mission critical role for the cassette tape system. It isn’t as if the plane will fall out of the sky if the tape starts to jam up.
The amateur computing enthusiast cassette tape system (the Kansas City standard) was pretty dreadful. Designed to use a minimum of components it was otherwise a very poor system. No reason why a much more sophisticated, useful and reliable system could not have been build around the humble cassette. There were a few systems back in the 80’s. One trick was to use the full width of the tape - getting you 4 tracks. Using a more sensible data encoding than simple modulated audio, and you could do vastly better.
Rather than dredge up a zombie I’d just add that a good non-sparking 8 lb. sledge hammer is $235.35 off-the -shelf from McMaster-Carr, while a 16 lb. version is $409.06. Good tools, in general, are expensive.
Nitpick: the aircraft shown in the video is a Tornado GR1. It’s a dedicated attack aircraft (bomber), not a fighter-bomber. The interceptor variant - the Tornado ADV - wasn’t developed until later on.
Tornado development actually began in the 1960s (just).
Tsk. It’s an air force plane, not a navy one! It’s the Iron Eagle soundtrack.
The original IBM PC (5150) and the Apple ][ shipped with cassette based storage originally. HP which was also used commonly in USAF planes also used it as a storage medium.
It is actually quite a robust storage medium compared to contemporary alternatives.
FWIW the data cassettes I have still read and load reliably with my Atari 410 plugged into an Atari 800. who doesn’t like sitting there listening to nasty tones for 5 minutes in order to play Frogger?
Be glad you didn’t own a Commodore. I eventually figured out that their data cassette did its error checking by storing each program twice. When you loaded a program, it loaded the first copy and then compared it with the second copy. If the bytes didn’t match, it failed the load. So basically it took twice as long to load and was half as reliable, since if either copy was bad in any way then the whole thing failed.
I don’t know why they did it that way. Sure it was the early(ish) days of home computers, but better technology for that sort of thing already existed and was well known. The CRC check was invented in the early 1960s, for crying out loud, and even a brain-dead 8 bit processor can calculate a CRC on the fly at the data rates they were using back then.
I had kept my first cassette tape from my TRS-80 programming days just for nostalgia reasons, but I have no idea what eventually happened to it. Who knows, it might still be hiding in my house somewhere. Even if the tape itself hasn’t disintegrated, it’s not like I have a working TRS-80 to test it on.
I presume for the same reasons people flunk computer science today.
One really needs to use an error-correcting code. Someone who knew what they were doing would also know exactly which type of code and what parameters to use given the exact hardware.
People forget that 16K of on-board RAM is not a lot, especially without virtual memory or random access storage. Many small machines from this era even lacked lower case letters.
The Apple ][, the Apple ][ Plus had no lowercase, which is functionality that was gained only in the Apple ][e
You people with your fancy store-bought Frogger tapes. When I had a computer with a tape drive (a Tandy CoCo 2) I got my programs on tape by hand-typing them in from Byte Magazine.
