108 Rare and Bizarre Media Types

[@wilhelmtaylor9863]

I was the opto-mechanical engineer at Plasmon in 2002-2004. I hold several of the patents on the media you showed (LM1200) and the machines that read them. The media is 2 glass plates spaced ~1mm apart, with vacuum deposited Tellurium Oxide on the inner surfaces. The laser burned physical holes on the order of 100nm. This disc held 1GB and was used in hospitals, data centers and even the library of congress. The military was a big customer as well. We followed up with a 2GB version within a year. The media was accessed by 2 readers, 1 per side. We also developed a disc center, about the size of a refrigerator, which held 48 or 96 discs which were randomly accessible. A whopping 96GB at your fingertip!

[@EyeHeru]

I came here just for comments like this

[@heypistolero]

It's amazing how far we've come in such a short time

[@IIIVI]

Guys like you are the reason we have such great PC/Media technology today. Thank you!

[@boxthememeguy]

far out dude

[@StilltheOneTCF]

Agree.

[@sniderg25]

I cannot help but imagine that each of these defunct formats was the culmination of some person's life work.

[@save_theworld]

And some apes are thumbing them down

[@CallyWasHereOfficial]

That makes it so much sadder

[@cyberblah]

I don't know, a good number of them were probably thrown together with as little effort as possible because it was easier than explaining to the the marketing department why they were morons.

[@andystuart4667]

Their magnum opus was the Shenia Twain format

[@masonsykes2240]

God, imagine being the guy whose lifes work was the RCA CED disc...

[@ZTenski]

6:21 the removal of the platters from those floppy cartidges gave me that wrenching feeling in my gut, as if millions of bits suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.. Pure carnage.

[@stephensnell1379]

That doesn't even matter as Floppy disks don't exist anymore

[@TheTimgta]

@@stephensnell1379 so this video of him holding floppy disks is CGI

[@graduationkanye91107]

@@stephensnell1379 what? floppy disks exist obviously and are still made

[@HamguyBacon]

@@stephensnell1379 that's the point

[@ianwright1791]

Nice movie quote.

[@honeythunder]

Not sure if someone already mentioned it but I.R.S. was a record label in the 80’s. That tape is presumably music videos. This video is fantastic!

[@Mike-yz4ek]

When I saw your comment, I almost cheered outloud! lol The Go-Go's were on that label for a time. And I recognized it as soon as I saw it HAHAHAHA

[@aleks1939]

I'd love to see which videos are on that tape!

[@kalenieity]

I believe REM was also on the IRS label in the 80s

[@schlotdoglaser]

Stuart Copeland from "The Police", his brothers started I.R.S.

[@Mike-yz4ek]

@@schlotdoglaser that's really cool!!! I didnt know that! Love The Police too!

[@FooneTuring]

Hi, I'm the Foone Turing who loaned a bunch of these to the 8-Bit Guy! Some explanations for the ones without info: 7:27 - Demidiskette Prototype: This as an IBM floppy from '83, it never came out. This is a very early one because the promotional info IBM put out had hard shelled disks. 8:08 - Brother Micro Disc: Used on professional embroidery/sewing machines 8:53 - MCD Cassette. A Hungarian design from 1973, Commodore evaluated it, but in the end it only got used some by some Eastern Bloc kit-computers. 9:12 - Video Floppy Disk: The explanation is correct for the right disk, but the left one is actually a digital data variant of the same media, used on Sony wordprocessors. 13:08 - Sony SD-1 Cassette: This is a data tape variant of the earlier D1 tape, which contained uncompressed digital video. Sony just reused the tapes for the ID-1 backup system. 21:26 - Floptical: This one is actually in the wrong section: Floptical disks are magnetic, not optical, but they're called that because they use an optical method to accurately position the read/write head. 21:40 - Dataplay: An amusing thing about this disk is that he calls out that TechMoan did a video on them. This is actually one of the disks shown in the Techmoan video! He gave me one after the video was completed. 22:51: WORM discs: There's really two types here. The first one shown is the Sony CRVDisc, which is an analog recordable video format similar to laserdisc. Techmoan did a good video on these, they were used in education, museums, TV production, and training. The other type is the data discs, which were used in two ways: 1. Optical Libraries. This is where you'd have like 50 of them slotted into a rack, and a robot arm that could pull them out and swap them into a reader. This let you have tons of data (for 1987, at least) available. This was a big deal when hard drives were small and expensive. 2. Financial records. The SEC required these to be used for securities trading, because it meant the broker-dealers could stream trades out to them as they happened, and the SEC could then later audit them without worry that they'd been altered (since WORM discs can't be overwritten) 26:16 - NEC MVDisc: This was used in a Japan-only DVR, the GigaStation MV-10000. The idea was that swappable discs was a better storage medium for recorded TV than an internal hard drive, since you could build up a library of them. It failed. 28:29 - CD-Video 8": The reason this looks like a laserdisc yet is labeled CD-Video is simple: It is just a laserdisc. They were trying to do a soft-relaunch of laserdisc under the CD-Video name, and this is one of the discs made for that effort. 33:46 - MODisc: This is just a M-Disc. The logo is confusing. 35:26 - the similar-to-UDO disk is a small WORM disc.

[@juliannesermon8057]

This should be pinned at the top

[@summerlaverdure]

i knew there was no way 8bg could outgeek the mighty @foone

[@logicaldojo1901]

It's @foone! ...wait a minute, this isn't Twitter

[@MikeDest]

I enjoy your death generator. thank you.

[@bbqgiraffe3766]

Damn you have a yt channel? i thought you were just on twitter lol

[@Craig_Anderson]

If you add '0:00 - Intro' to the beginning of your table of contents, KZbin will automatically map all of them onto the video timeline!

[@piecaruso97]

yes, that's a very nice newer feature they added

[@LloydLynx]

Wait, actually!? Do you have an example I can see?

[@Craig_Anderson]

@@LloydLynx kzbin.info/www/bejne/mJ_Gm2aNgrOtrNk If you know of older videos that have a table of contents starting at 0:00, they should work now too

[@mystery_pond]

@@Craig_Anderson Am I missing something here? That video looks exactly the same as this one, nothing extra on the video timeline, just clickable links in the description... Checked on my phone and my PC, too.

[@yourick1953]

@@mystery_pond No worries, you'll likely get it soon once youtube rolls it out worldwide, as i have the newer timeline features on some videos.

[@j.t.illingworth7925]

Those floppy disks were having a 35 year slumber until their guts were ripped out.

[@t4ky0n]

just described waking up

[@matturner6890]

@ J.T. Illingworth *their

[@Possumn1138]

Over time the media on the material tended to flake off and become unusable. So I transferred all my old dial up and BBS time period, windows, DOS and Basic programs from back in the day, over to CD disks as back up copies, just to store them on. So I still have them. I use to run with removable hard drives and trays, so any machine's hardware can easily be set up specifically and used under any operating system I choose, with just a different hard drive tray. So If I wished to run the old arcade game of "Stargate" on a windows 2.0, or 3.11 machine setting, it was still possible. I still play that old arcade game from time to time, it came out well before the movie of the same name. If I wanted to set up one of the old dial up BBS system programs these days, I'd likely use a windows emulator program instead, but for me, it gradually became a collection. Of every dos version, and every windows versions we had back then, and the software that each of them used. I do remember once, that in a time of trouble, the Egyptian government, just flipped a switch, and all the internet available there just simply went away. Yet I still have modems on hand. and the software to run with them. But I suppose, that is what getting older is, I still have 3 six hour VHS taped I made from two networks from 9/11 as a part of all of this, when one tape ended, i just slapped in another blank VHS tape that day and kept recording.. And the windows 3.11 version of solitaire was much better than any that followed it. In may ways, their media player programs were better as well. and some of the other utilities were better just for what they included within them. But what does one do with foot lockers full of an obsolete collection like that?

[@manfail7469]

@@Possumn1138 upload them online? Put them into a museum?

[@lerpalerpa581]

Disturbingly reminiscent of modern mans retirement years

[@Socal_Geo1]

About that giant audio cassette: The Sony SD1-1300LA is actually a type of data storage tape. It belongs to the Super AIT (SAIT) family of tape formats, which were designed for high-capacity data backup and archiving. The SD1-1300LA is an SAIT-1 tape that offers a native storage capacity of 500 GB (uncompressed) and 1.3 TB (terabytes) when using a 2.6:1 compression ratio. These tapes were used primarily in enterprise environments and data centers for reliable long-term storage and backup of large amounts of data. The SAIT format, including the SD1-1300LA, provided high capacity, fast transfer rates, and durability, making it suitable for businesses and organizations that required secure and efficient data storage solutions.

[@etchatails]

Holy crap tapes could hold a lot more than a cassette

[@mewity]

my hard drive is 4x smaller in memory than that casette

[@raymondanimalcrossing]

I can only imagine that 30 years from now there will be a "the 64-bit guy" doing videos on things we have now and it would be like "Now this is a microsd card from Sandisk. Despite its size it only holds 1 terabyte of data. Now back then that was a huge deal, since it fit more data than the entire data production of humanity up to the 1960's into the size of a fingernail, but these were eventually killed off by the rise of quantum memory in the mid 2030's.

[@apollomars1678]

its crazy, that quantum memory accessibility of data would be an actual realistic motherfucking game changer in IT........mainly, because you could even transport energy in a similar way......wireless......without loading......ever.......yep......but im not sure, if it is really possible AND not deadly for things between the object with energy and the device for the energy.......probably something for space travel.

[@johnconnorstopskynet]

Would be super sick if it was his kid

[@tbuk8350]

Quantum computing and programming is super weird lol. I was reading something on it, and they were saying stuff like "sometimes when programming a quantum computer, two qubits may clash and create a quantum entanglement, which will cause your code to fail, and it's often difficult to find the cause of the quantum clashing..." Like, am I supposed to know what any of that means?

[@apollomars1678]

@@tbuk8350 i will point out, that this should go against the No-cloning theorem, that was more or less proven in the 1970th and later. i think your statement is more about the Quantum chromodynamics and thereby connected to today possible quantum computing. there is A LOT of talka bout the "QCD matter". i presume, your paper is a paper about this topic. now quantum computing has A LOT of free potential and on a theoretical level there are even pure fictional crypto-technics, designed, that would work perfectly with quantum computing, IF they would be some hundred-thousand times better than the most modern concepts of these computers today (dont talk even about actual real Quantum computers, they are like calculators, compared to the ideal concepts, what could be build with our knowledge, IF we wouldnt have to follow restrictions of....pfff...money...time....space) SO, it is always important to differentiate between theoretical quantum computing and realistic modern quantum computing.

[@tbuk8350]

@@apollomars1678 Yeah. Something I'm pretty sure is a current issue with modern quantum computing is quantum entanglement, which is incredibly confusing to understand.

[@jobsgarage]

The Edison type wax cylinders touch a string in my heart, as this unlikely media (via a later transfer on a compact cassette) are the reason I am aware of what my grandfather's voice sounded like. And it kind of sounded like mine. He passed away decades before I was born.

[@powerplantpipe]

aww thats awesome and sad

[@GothAlice]

But mostly awesome, in the "awe" sense. It must have been absolutely uncanny to hear that voice. Little stories like this are why I'm a data archivist. In this day and age, no-one need ever be forgotten. Thank you for sharing.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

@@GothAlice Do you tend to collect things at home, as well? Or are you able to restrain your OCD to the professional arena? ;)

[@1Thunderfire]

@@GothAlice What do you do as a data archivist? I find this kind of thing interesting.

[@rustykoehler2789]

I own an Edison Diamond disc. I don't own a player. Or an edison cylander They are the neatest thing ever.

[@Shadow77999]

they shouldnt have ditched the "CD in a floppy case" format.. it gives them soo much more longevity from scratches..

[@michaelbianchi22]

I agree, but in it's current format, if you scratch a disc enough, you have to buy a new one. Meaning they make more money. I think that's the reason why it didn't take off.

[@michaelbianchi22]

@Zippydsm Lee true, but if you haven't noticed, most people are floaters who buy whatever is in front of them.

[@pawefdfdfdf8321]

Its like PSP cd i have A lot of scratched psp cds

[@nunya___]

Most video rental stores here have resurfacing machines that makes them look new in like 60 seconds. My store charged $1 per disk. 🥂 🥳

[@klaasj7808]

too expensive, thats the reason. max profit.

[@Nacho-Mamma]

The single sided 78 @ 2:23 is actually used for mainly on air broadcasting. Although a consumer could purchase the same recording that included a side b, single sided 78rpms were easier to catalog in a station archive. I grew up in a home without a television until 1972. Until then, we had 3 pianos, an radio & a Victrola with nearly 500 78rpms. The victrola sat beside the piano I always played, and is how I actually learned to play. I would pluck out what I heard, eventually becoming a mimic pianist. It’s funny that when I finally was sent for piano lessons, I taught my teacher things she didn’t know. Listening to the 78 recordings of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” is how I learned to play it, and was the pianist with our local symphony orchestra in 1982.

[@yankusnatch]

quit yappin

[@TheRandomZachChannel]

I love how you and LGR frequently give each other shoutouts. It’s cool to see such a tight community.

[@ashroskell]

This is my first visit. Blown away. Betamax was so much better quality than VHS. But, that old argument rages on into irrelevance. Watching him put his fingers on the tracks of those records, early on, made me wince. I got regular floppy vinyl records with a magazine called, “Top Charts,” or something like that, which my parents used to get for us kids. They work just fine, but some slip, and I never could figure out why some worked better than others. Do you remember 45’s with snap-out centres? That you could switch between records? Some of those old computer floppy discs may not have been demagnetised? Especially East European ones? He might have the nuclear launch codes from the soviet Missile silos, from Kazakhstan? 😦😁😉

[@DarthEd77]

I.R.S. was a music label. That’s the video of R.E.M.’s “Pretty Persuasion”, like what MTV would play. That tape is probably quite valuable to R.E.M. collectors!

[@PaulinaAngel]

DarthEd77 I just had to laugh because he had no idea what I.R.S. was since it was a major label back in the 80’s.

[@pongusikya]

Surprised the 8 Bit guy didn't put that together.

[@SilverState99]

There's R.E.M. collectors?

[@garrycowan4394]

Was about to say the exact same thing..well spotted 👍

[@TheMrMarkW]

@@SilverState99 The biggest selling disc last Record Store Day was a bootleg pressing of an REM live gig under the pseudonym of a band called 'Bingo Hand Job' - flew off the shelves. There is a huge market for old REM recordings and stuff like that U-Matic is very rare and exceptionally collectible.

[@MichaelXX2]

4:57 "If enough people are interested" YES I AM INTERESTED

[@paradoxzee6834]

Always interested in that stuff

[@michaelwhalenjr4499]

@@paradoxzee6834 Yes, please

[@nicolasgerman5457]

Bump bump

[@markpenrice6253]

I just hope he does the smart thing of dubbing the contents to tape or a digital file at the same time as playing it out, because flexidiscs aren't exactly known for their durability. You play that a dozen times and it might be worn beyond re-use. I think they were meant as single-use distribution mules (rather cheaper and simpler than taping a cassette to the cover) or master copies, not actual working media.

[@rahb1]

@@markpenrice6253 "flexidiscs aren't exactly known for their durability" TOO true! I used to love the sample discs sent out by Readers Digest, as I couldn't afford their real records then; however they would always wear out after three or four plays, from memory. Of course, our cheap mono radiogram (back then) certainly did not help! Sometimes I wish I had been born earlier and into a wealthy family, so I could have appreciated directly much of what is shown here... Sigh! I'm now happy with external backup hard discs and a NAS, plus my iPad and iPod for enjoying music away from the computer. If it gets easier from now, I'm not all that interested!

[@timacrow]

When I worked for Muzak in the 1990s, I saw some of those 16" records. They played at 16 RPM and held about an hour of music. They were one-sided and had a pattern etched into the back surface. At the time I saw them, they were very old archival pieces that were being digitized for the company's 75th anniversary.

[@allanrichardson3135]

I believe that format (and speed) was also used for audio books for the blind. One-speed players were loaned out via charities for the blind, and disks were loaned out from a library.

[@ULTRAFABUZAK]

Nice, they are very collectable today. 🎵🎵

[@mrb692]

28:55 Technology Connections recently completed a *5* part deep dive on the CED. It’s worth a watch!

[@Phred_Phlintstoner]

I hoped someone would mention technology connection! Great channel!

[@corwin881]

Exactly 😁

[@eugenetswong]

I haven't watched enough of TechMoan to have an opinion on him, but I was disappointed to see him get so many more mentions than Technology Connections. I don't know enough about Technology Connections to be 100% confident about him, but he seems to be 100% reliable.

[@corwin881]

@@eugenetswong I appreciate both.

[@zebunker]

Too gay to watch though

[@jasonwatkins4277]

When I was stationed the USCGC Polar Sea (1993-1997), we would get movies for the crew on 8mm from the studios. We could not play them until we were out of US territorial waters. Most of the movies were still in theaters or soon to be released.

[@TjSBMD1810]

GDRom: The format used on Sega Dreamcast. Diameter like a CD with total capacity of 1GByte supporting CD Audio but the data is stored on the outer ring and the data is read from outer to inner to have increased loading speed.

[@EngineerOfChaos]

In a similar vein, the GameCube, Wii, and Wii U also had their own file formats that were similar in storage capacity to but not actually miniDVDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays

[@Segafishy]

It was used in Arcade machines too via the Naomi hardware which was based on the DCs architecture but had more power.

[@5CaribouLou]

@@Segafishy While this is correct, the majority of Naomi games were run from cartridges. wiki.arcadeotaku.com/w/Sega_NAOMI#Game_List

[@poble]

weren't gd-roms basically dual layer cd-roms?

[@ChadDidNothingWrong]

maybe, but the dream cast GD-Roms weren't. They were actually higher density single sided.

[@vreiner]

the 600Mb tape cartridge shown at 17:07 is a Teac data cartridge, and was competing with 8mm at the time for the data backup market. I'm sure Teac was leveraging their experience with audio cassette mechanisms, and saving money on the manufacturing process. What was interesting about it was it was designed as a "streaming tape"; so rather than zipping back and forth and pausing constantly as 8mm did, it was designed to drive the tape in one direction for long continuous periods, resulting in fast read and write times and better storage density.

[@dudervision]

The large cassette from Sony is actually a D1 videotape. I used to edit to that format. The recording machine is the Sony DVR 1000 which cost about $170,000 when it was in use. It’s the highest resolution NTSC video there is and is component digital.

[@peterthx]

I thought D1 was composite and D2 was component digital.

[@matthewweng8483]

Same here… remember how ‘holy’ everyone considered the D2? I started as an AE at Producers Color Service in Detroit, and man, if you dropped a D2 Master, the pit went dead quiet… We started a boutique post house in 1996, and buying those decks and tape stock ourselves was painful, but still cool.

[@hangvo9515]

Is there any camcorders which used that format?

[@wattsyvfx]

actually its not a video tape. for a little while, sony sold a helical scan digital recorder/player intended for computer backups and similar uses. they barely sold any of them- i think NASA had a few, ILM had a couple, and a company i worked for in the early 90s, Computer Film Company, bought two and spent a couple years trying to make them work reliably. My good friend Dave Scott was the guy writing the software, and we all loved (hated) the error messages he wrote for the myriad failure modes of this infernal beast. “I’m sorry, the Sony has failed you” . damn that machine.

[@wattsyvfx]

it did use a D1 shaped tape, and i think you could get away with using D1 video media in it, but it was frowned upon.

[@wyattroncin941]

3:53 regarding punch cards, they actually predate the 20's by centuries, with the first punch card programmed semi-automated loom invented in 1725, and the first fully automated loom invented in 1804. As for data storage, the 1890 US census was recorded and tabulated via punch card and counting machines. There's also the long history of musical devices which played on pinned drums or cut and punched plates or sheets, which could be seen as a type of basic punch card as well.

[@orbitalair2103]

Somebody else watched 'Connections' by James Burke !! kudos. Jacard(sp) Looms, used punchcards to automate the weaving of cloth. One of the first 'programmable' devices.

[@5roundsrapid263]

orbitalair “Jacquard”. The fabric is still named after him to this day.

[@videodistro]

@@orbitalair2103 Not necessarily. This information is contained in many books, and on films other than James Burke old BBC series! While I enjoyed James' work, he isn't the only sourceof information. :) We learned about the Jacard looms way back in grade school, long before James did his BBC series. ;)

[@wyattroncin941]

@@orbitalair2103 actually, it's part of computer and machine automation history, and i know for a fact it was part of the CNC programming course i took a few years ago. that said, i knew it well before then so i can't say where i originally learned it.

[@MWGrossmann]

12:01 -- I.R.S. IRS was THE record label of the '80s, with bands from REM to The English Beat to tTe Go-Go's, it was run by the brother of the drummer for The Police. Anothjer Copeland brother ran a talent agency called "F.B.I." Maybe you and obsoletemedia - dot - org could collaborate; they have more info on media like the LM4000 (24:01). Someone else may have already written this somewhere in the current ~9000 comments, but on the off-chance that everyone else thought the same and so also didn't post...

[@unknownwake]

Speaking of R.E.M., the tape even says it's a demo of the Pretty Persuasion video!

[@emmpedno2161]

HE'S A MORON, THAT'S WHY.. HE KNOWS NOTHING AND PRETENDS TO KNOW EVERYTHING

[@acertainshape]

@@emmpedno2161 you'd think he would at least bother to do a Google search to find out what it was. But no.

[@williamjones7163]

The BYTE Magazine from September 1978. I had graduated from High School in June 1978. I had seen STAR WARS 5 times that summer and was going off to college at Montana State University to major in Computer Science in September. Also in that magazine they were experimenting with bar codes and distributing software that way. I think that better high speed modems were released and so that idea was scrapped.

[@flumpis]

"I'll show you a dirty trick for removing the media from these without using any cutting tools." BUT AT WHAT COST

[@cowcannon8883]

"Everything"

[@w8kdzradio113]

but he could have just spun it in the jacket to show the difference between hard and soft sector

[@cluadvan]

"Everything.."

[@adrianmacalino4277]

IT HURTS MY EYES FJSJS

[@jenzbrettschneider8838]

Never Seen before 16inch Vinyl. There are some nice more Mechanical Store System

[@Jester62D]

Showing my age, I was an engineering intern at Iomega, working on the Bernoulli 20 & 44. My experience there landed my first engineering job with Ampex in CoSp in 1990. I was in the Scanner Dept where we built type C (reel to reel) & D2 digital tape scanners. We eventually made a storage system of 256 thirty minute cassettes with 4 players. It stored a massive 6.4 Tb of data in a 7' w x 7' t x 4' d cabinet containing a cartridge picking robot. All that storage now fits on a device about 1/2 the thickness & 1/2 the width of just 1 cassette. BTW. Great video on the floppy drive media. I remember saving my Fortran 77 programs on them after writing them on the fast IBM AT 286 PC's in the lab.

[@djjdevosWasAtTheShow]

Was wondering how far I'd have to scroll before someone mentioned Bernoulli disks. They were my favorite in their time - much preferred over the more common Syquest cartridges.

[@herrbonk3635]

I also remember how impressively quick those "overclocked" 12, 16 or 20 MHz 286 computers were, compared to what you were used to in the mid 1980s. As fast as a 386, although only 16-bit. Then the 486 came and drastically changed the speed standard again.

[@ballyastrocade5672]

I had one of those Bernoulli 20Mb drives back in the day! Great little drive, although it was a bit annoying that it only seemed to work with its own proprietary controller card and not a standard SCSI interface like the later drives. (I later heard that certain specific Adaptec controllers would work, but neither Adaptec nor Iomega exactly went out of their way to tell you which ones.) What I appreciated most about Iomega was their customer service at the time. I had bought the drive as an "open box" from a local store, and the kit was missing the cleaning cartridge. I called them up to see about ordering a replacement, and the lady took down my name and address, asked for the serial number of the drive, and said "okay, we'll send you one right away." I said "wait, how much *is* it?", and she said "oh, no charge, we'll just send you one." A few months later, I ordered some more blank cartridges, and one of the carts turned out to be defective and wouldn't format -- not only did they take it back, no questions asked, but they sent me *two* replacements. That's the sort of service that makes for loyal customers.

[@Rib_]

The "MO-Disc" you showed is actually just an M-Disc like the one you showed after, just with a different (and obviously more confusing) earlier logo which can easily be misread.

[@MindCruising]

Was going to say this as well. The patent numbers are the same too.

[@anonymousidea9119]

Yup, was looking for this.

[@nickbiss39]

The logo is for the Millenniata M-Disc.

[@RokasSondaras]

That's why product design is so important :D

[@Dargonhuman]

Interesting; I wouldn't know as my only experience with an MO-Disc is the key item from the original Resident Evil 2 that you need to escape the lab complex.

[@jlhjlh]

Holy shit I'm in tears... the nostalgia overload is too much! I was not even aware of all these failed formats. Thank you so much for this video!

[@staticfanatic]

me: "i'm not THAT big of a geek." 8-bit guy: "here's forty minutes of weird media." me: "yes pls"

[@g984]

same!

[@leonardodepinto7912]

Me too

[@sterling_max]

past is the time I dare to consider myself less nerd than I am.

[@colinroberts9544]

Lol, mate you nailed it with that comment 👍

[@jasonbenson036]

Right!?

[@cottonfoo]

The "MO DISC" at 33:51 is an M-DISC, write-once archival storage. It's just an earlier logo.

[@woodwaker1]

I still have 2 drives and 50 blank disks

[@Request_2_PANic]

Technology Connections did some videos on CED, Laserdisc, CD video, FlexPlay, and DVD RAM, while mentioning DualDisc and VHD too.

[@wanteds13]

I had a bernoulli box back in the day. It was connected through a SCSI interface and had large 8 inch cartridge type 'floppy disks' that could hold 5, 10 or 20 meg per disk. I only had 10 meg disks. In those days, my pc had a 20 meg harddrive, so being able to store this much on a removable media was kind of awesome back than!

[@mattelder1971]

When I was in the Navy in the early-mid 90s, we got our movies to play on the ship in 8mm videotape format. I ran the closed circuit TV system on my ship for a couple of years. Each month or two, they would ship us a new container holding a dozen or so tapes and we'd have to ship back a certain number of older tapes. The person who took care of it before me kept up with all of that on paper, but I finally wrote a database for it to make things much easier.

[@richardhaas39]

I was in the Navy in the seventies overseas. I was unable to see Star Wars when it came out because George Lucas would not release it in 16mm. He thought it was too easy to pirate.

[@sarenabarrett7929]

I was in the Navy from 93 - 98. We did the same thing. ICs were in charge of it. But we had 8 mm and betamax.

[@andrewbuckley2627]

@@richardhaas39 If only there was branch made to stop piracy....

[@cwaldrip]

IRS was a record label, it’s the original label for REM in this case.

[@tim_brooks]

mtv used umatics to play videos, when they used to play videos.

[@SaltBayGull]

I believe it stands for international record syndicate. They had a lot of great bands. That irs logo was like a guarantee that the record you got was good.

[@nicholashatsis1754]

And Pretty Persuasion at that! Good track.

[@vguyver2]

@@SaltBayGull Tower Records in NYC actually had a neat display of those a long while back.

[@wendyokoopa7048]

@@SaltBayGull the whole i.r.s records story is quite oddly and humorously fascinating to me. Turns out the founder of the label has connections to the police and their other brother founded frontier booking international.

[@weasel2htm]

For those U-Matic tapes, you might get in touch with Ben Minnotte of Oddity Archive. He has a working U-Matic deck and the ability to digitize them. Maybe you could work a deal to where he could digitize the tapes for you.

[@Kylefassbinderful]

That's such a great channel

[@Russmrh1]

I have a wire recorder from my grandfather. That was a format recorded down to thick wire that went from one spool to another. I remember a number of formats that you referred to. Now I feel old. I also have a number of vhs reel to reel tapes and recorder. Thanks for the memories.

[@SuperCookieGaming_]

if you want more on selectavision/CED i highly recommend Technology Connection's 5 part series on the product

[@needfuldoer4531]

Alec's 5 part trilogy on RCA's 17-year-long game of "stop hitting yourself" is brilliant.

[@ChakatSandwalker]

'The increasingly inaccurate trilogy'... It was a fantastic series.

[@vguyver2]

@@needfuldoer4531 I was really happen when he pulled this format out after having seen that very same 5 parter.

[@promontorium]

You don't just seem to have random examples of media, you seem to have ridiculously rare and perhaps unique information that would be valuable regardless of format.

[@Marco-bp4nt]

Man is an encyclopedia of old tech

[@alexfinns6162]

@@Marco-bp4nt lol

[@dexterdextrow7248]

@@WideNerdy like that you just name-drop some other random youtuber that wasn't in any way mentioned or particularly associated with the comment you respond to.

[@snoopdoggthecertifiedg6777]

@@dexterdextrow7248 it is related. It’s a compliment to 8-Bit Guy and a slight to LGR, I thought it was well said.

[@dexterdextrow7248]

@@snoopdoggthecertifiedg6777 LGR wasn't in any way connected or even eluded to in the initial comment. Noone even mentioned him, so the fact that "this random KZbinr the content of which also have a partial relation to older technology is entertaining but not as knowledgeable" has a very weak connection to the original comment. One thing would have been if LGR was indeed spoken of, but this isn't the case, he's just a random person that happen to cover somewhat similar topics. It's a bit like bringing up and comparing Nicola Tesla, Johannes Gutenberg and Thomas Newcomen when someone mentions Tim Berners-Lee just because they're also inventors.

[@Video_Crow]

I actually have access to several 3/4" U-Matic decks. I could transfer that A-Team video for you.

[@justingreen8006]

I hope he takes you up on your offer 😊

[@forge20]

This comment right here. We gotta see that video. This sounds like ... a plan.

[@kagenlim5271]

@@forge20 I love It when a plan comes together in the comments

[@lukesalisbury6031]

I have to see this.

[@vguyver2]

@@forge20 There are so many fan circles and websites that would love to see if showcased. Heck if PWE succeeds in assisting, it can be material used for a comicon.

[@jimblodget]

I worked at a local independent television station in the early 70s. We recorded all of our shows on 2 inch quad videotape. The player recorders were the size of large washing machines. The reels came in two sizes. Large ones held an hour, and small ones were for commercials.

[@jmoreno600]

That enormous Sony cassette was used to record data streams from radar and sonar equipment. It was used with the Sony DIR-1000H ID-1 Format Instrumentation Recorder.

[@waltersteenvoorden252]

The DIR-1000 system was based on the D-1 standard of digital video recorders. Sony did this a lot, they also had a system of recording digital audio on analogue u-matic tape and data archive 8mm tapes based on the Hi8 video tape standard.

[@yveice]

i was thinking of the SONY DMS 24 (it-dep-fio-ds.web.cern.ch/documentation/tapedrive/sony1000.gif) Digital-Magnetic-Storage System. 100GB on one tape, 2TB total storage on 24 tapes, managed by the system and accessible over tcp, in a time where a 1GB harddrive was a "i will never have enough data to fill it up...". Now we are at more then 5TB each tape..., 10TB a disk ...

[@mannycervantes5827]

@@waltersteenvoorden252 The D1 and DIR did share the format and mechanical standard to a degree. The tapes did not interchange with the two machines. Video is very "Redundant" and with error correction and error concealment it would hide many bit errors. Where as Data recording there is no concealment, so the error rates have to be much much lower. The DIR machine had an air filter to keep dust out that the D1 did not. If errors in the recording were detected to be too great it would re-record that data. I used to do complete mechanical rebuilds to the D1, including adjusting head height alignments to the 4 record heads, both scary and exhilarating at the same time.

[@mark-adams]

IRS was a record label: REM, The Go-Gos, The Beat, etc.

[@zenbeeblebrox9339]

Beaten to it. That's why I popped into the comments. Heh

[@mark-adams]

@@zenbeeblebrox9339 In my haste, I forgot to mention some of my favorite IRS bands: The Alarm, Oingo Boingo, The Bangles. A lot of these bands published under multiple labels, and some only published with IRS at the beginnings of their careers before moving on to other labels.

[@trevorhanlin4247]

Yeah, that tape contains REM's "Pretty Persuasion", you can see it briefly.

[@PHAEDRIDER]

the cramps

[@jamesrickel3814]

IRS the cutting edge was a show on MTV

[@datagod]

Those unusual floppies make my eyes hurt. Like I am staring into an object from an alternate universe. I had no idea the even existed. Great video as always.

[@im_avg_joe]

Thank you for briefly mentioning Mini Discs, which is my favorite audio format of all time. Very well designed and held a lot of audio when used right

[@piusfelix]

Punch cards were first used to store “data” in the early 19th century in the jacquard loom which allowed complex weaving patterns to be stored on a series of punched cards.

[@shadowflash705]

piusfelix They were used even before in toys and music boxes. Jacquard loom was very important though as it's was the very first programmable industrial machine.

[@vintagethrifter2114]

Punchcards were first used as information storage in the 1890 US Census with the Hollerith Machine. The US Census continued to use punchcards into the 1950s until they were replaced with more modern "computers."

[@hedgehog3180]

Punch cards have one hell of a history. They are probably the longest lasting form of data storage made to be read by machines so they took part in some pretty important historical events. Their most infamous use was probably in the holocaust where the Germans used IBM supplied punch card machines in order to organize the holocaust. The only slight sliver lining to that is that it also meant that later families who had been affected by the holocaust could use them in order to secure reperations. There's a lot of history though that's a lot less grim like their use in industrial machinery and early computers.

[@recycledsteel3693]

It says here 1725 yep they sure are old... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#History

[@hikariyouk]

Even Jacquard's loom was a development of an earlier idea; his design was based on Bouchon's earlier loom, which used punch tape to control it.

[@purplegill10]

31:04 For those curious about this, Technology Connections has a great video all about Flexplay

[@adamwishneusky]

Yes! It’s great along with all his videos examining weird old crap

[@johnjohnjohnh]

I didn't realize i watched 37 minutes of media types. The quick jump between the different types kept the interest. great video thanks for doing this one!

[@jamesplotkin4674]

I set it to 1.25 so I could hear his little giggle faster.

[@antonvann2576]

The gold 8" Video Laserdisc was used in Video Jukeboxes. In that application, it had video 5 tracks a side for music videos. A jukebox offering 200 songs would have a mechanism holding 20 of these discs.

[@alxbrrn]

I love the face that he puts when he shows large media, he's pretty proud to show us his media format collection. Great respect to this man 😊

[@raven4k998]

don't you wonder what wonders are stored on that sony sd1 cassette?

[@romualdasseman9158]

Hello, IRS means for that case: "International records Syndicate", then records industry who released bands such like Concrete Blonde or Wall of Voodoo.

[@shaft9000]

Going by the label it is a copy of the R.E.M. 'pretty persuasion' music video presumably this one: kzbin.info/www/bejne/imfQdY2nfrKBqLc

[@darthandeddeu]

REM & a lot of the Athens Ga scene as well, really the first ' collage Indie' label that set the standard for ' major independent label' going forward in their business & marketing practices along with factory records in the UK.

[@romualdasseman9158]

@@darthandeddeu Funny facts about Factory Uk, they rejected the Smith because they were not enough "bizarre". Sir Tony Wilson if we can call him that way, was such a genious but he refused them. Later Morissey was very mean about Barney (New Order) by pure jealousy.

[@gorkskoal9315]

Or Irwing R Shizter

[@WarrenSt.James_Guitarist]

the show was called..IRSs..the cutting edge...show the played cutting edge genre bands

[@childoferna]

M-Disc and "MO-Disc" are the same thing, the spiral is just a later logo. They were a glass-based DVD archival format (not magneto-optical). I have about 50-60 of them with backups and archives over the last 15 years. I still use them.

[@idgamingfederation202]

aren't M-Discs made of stone? not glass? I know one of my LG blu-ray burners are able to master them. I know the BH16NS40 Super Blue can, not 100% sure if my WH10LS30 can. either way, thanks for your time.

[@taiga1295]

Oh. I was actually thinking he's showing us the m-disk twice but wasn't sure.

[@metalinvalidmatt]

the "O" reminded me much of the Dreamcast logo - thought it might have been some GD-Rom related thing, especially as they made that "MIL-CD" thing, hence M(dreamcastlogo)-Disc.. ah well, nifty all the same

[@linoxyard]

I remember getting a free M@DVD when I purchased my first blu ray burner (LG brand). It said that they could be read anywhere but required a special burner with the M-DISC or M@DISC logo on it (like mine). I've never been able to find one again, at least here in Europe.

[@MrRom92DAW]

I love M-discs, I’ve used them for important backups as well. Not great data density but definitely great data permanence

[@nextgencowboy]

I worked for a major wholesale grocers for a short period of time in the late 2000s, and we were still using reel-to-reel tapes. There were actually multiple tapes sent location to location daily as a failsafe, making sure there were always at least 2 other copies of the data if one failed, was lost, etc.

[@avaughan585]

At 34:00, "MO" Disc is actually M-Disc, with a trademark swirl logo. M-DISC (Millennial Disc) was a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc. and was available as DVD and Blu-ray discs. Great video and excellent research! I remember we had a word processing typewriter that used a weird elongated floppy so there were probably loads of proprietary formats flying about in the late 80's and early 90's

[@miguelbravo3050]

isn´t that the dreamcast swirl?

[@runed0s86]

As of July 2021, Verbatim has started putting regular bluerays in mdisc packaging, labeling and charging them as mdisc media 😢

[@grfeld84]

I.R.S.: International Records Syndicate. They were a music company.

[@Fingers1234567890]

Acts on that label - R.E.M, The Go-Gos, Squeeze and many others

[@ProctorSilex]

@@Fingers1234567890 Yes, I remember the logo on R.E.M. albums.

[@johndavis3921]

The Information for the contents of the video are located on the lower left corner of the cartridge (00:12:05). R.E.M. and their song Pretty Persuasion (year of release 1984). A link for the video on this tape is kzbin.info/www/bejne/imfQdY2nfrKBqLc. Additional information on the song and the video can be found at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Persuasion_(song)#Music_video.

[@PracarYT]

69 likes

[@kandigloss6438]

this, honestly I would have thought that the video being labeled as containing an REM song would have given it away....

[@RCTommy]

4:37, flexible record, "THE FLOPPY ROM". Do we need an episode on that? Yes. Yes, we do. Dew it.

[@TheUltimoSniper]

I'd love to see it.

[@davidprice7648]

"the rigid floppy"

[@StreetComp]

Alec on Technology Connections does great series on that RCA CED format, really great if enjoy learning bout these old formats. Also SACD (DSD) is definitely still being used in 2022 and sounds way better than a regular CD if have a proper system 😎

[@dominichines9996]

13:40 Technically since "-ette" indicates that it is smaller, that would be a "cass"

[@deepdownyt]

cassettone

[@DASyam-tb7qt]

C-ass

[@dominichines9996]

@Lassi Kinnunen Casita would be little house

[@madmax9009]

Or a CASE (ette)

[@ambulocetusnatans]

That Cass is a big mama.

[@Salsuero]

It physically hurt when you destroyed those floppy disks.

[@stephenw2992]

I was remembering how much fun we had doing stuff like that, and how good a frisbee those 8 inch floppies made. It would have been more satisfying if he pulled out the felt lining of the floppies as well to disembowel them properly.

[@waynecarrjr.1187]

My body actually tensed up when he did that

[@aidancommenting]

I read a comment yesterday that somebody had tried to eject a DVD from their computer. The drive didn't slow down before it ejected and the disc... ejected itself. From the tray. Another comment I read, somebody had a top-loading drive and when they opened the door, microscopic _shards_ of DVD were spewing in every direction. I can only assume they don't have a DVD drive anymore.

[@aidancommenting]

Forgot to mention there was a third comment that somebody posted about a time they heard a loud bang noise in the office, and it turned out to be somebody's optical drive. The disc shattered inside the tray. I may have read more than a few of these.

[@tfilefan]

26:17 片面 means "single sided" 映像用 means "for video" just for sure.

[@JapanPop]

本当だ。

[@yulikitten]

What's the romaji pronunciation

[@tfilefan]

Sketchie P 片面 : kata men 映像用 : eizo yo

[@shmookins]

21:45. Wow. The smallest optical drive I ever say was the UMD for the PSP.

[@don67a]

That Amsoft 3" disk at 8:33: the metal you're seeing isn't the disk - it's a cover, like the metal cover on a standard 3.5" diskette - it's just that the cover is inside the case instead of outside (which makes it thicker than a standard 3.5"). The actual media is flexible like a normal floppy. They were used on British Amstrad computers of the mid '80s.

[@Electronics-Rocks]

I agree the metal is a flap to protect the disk

[@SemeshkoV]

Was using these on my ZX Spectrum +3. Single sided and storage space per side of around 76k? If memory recalls. And I still have an unopened box of these.

[@frankowalker4662]

I was giong to say the same thing. The disk inside is the same material as normal 3 1/2 inch disks. I think they are 170K.

[@andreiazzopardi]

@Lassi Kinnunen I noticed that no episodes on Amstrad CPC or ZX Spectrum were done. I do not think I ever heard a mention, but I might be wrong.

[@AmstradExin]

@@SemeshkoV They were 180K with 169K usable space for each size. But if you had good disks, you could format them over 210K per side with special tools on CPC. Also, there were double sided variants for the Joyce, that the CPC cannot read.

[@Luzgar]

29:02 *Technology Connections entered the chat* Did you watch the part 9 video of that glorious 2 part series?

[@vincentpelletier57]

It is a feature-length documentary on the SelectaVision!

[@tedjohansen1634]

Moi HAHAHAHAHAH 😍

[@hikkamorii]

Alternate title: Review topics for Techmoan

[@introgression]

I know! It's like you got your 8-Bit Guy in my Techmoan!!

[@HanZie82]

Was just about to say something like that. hahaha. If you watch this channel most likely you also watch Techmoan's channel. (if you dont i can recommend).

[@BertGrink]

@@HanZie82 Another great channel with a somewhat overlapping content is Technology Connections. :)

[@HanZie82]

@@BertGrink Thank you very much, altho its already on the subscription list. :D

[@BertGrink]

@@HanZie82 Of course you're watching that channel too hehe :D

[@CoolCademMAnimates-fz1ui]

Me and my grandfather pulled out his a few months back. We fixed it, used the head cleaner tape, bought adaptors so it can be used in the house (the one we had is a model meant for car dashboards) and bought speakers for it. Works a charm! Had to throw out some tapes though because some were too tight or too loose to be used after being stored away for 50 years.

[@darthdonkulous1810]

The first company I worked for after leaving school was still using the magnetic reel to reel tapes up until 2008! The only reason we still used it for so long was because a certain client of ours was still dumping all their data onto them, rather than sending over FTP (which everyone basically, had switched to). Seeing them again just made me smile lol. Great video!

[@1voiceofstl]

st.louis...local gas company was still useing punch cards in the early 2000's.

[@Jon6429]

Dowty fuel systems was still running punch tape on its big DIXI jig borer's until around the mid 90's

[@anonymous-nobody1]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes...correction, recorded media hurdling down the highway

[@chrisdavis3055]

I.R.S. Records was a record label that had artists like The Go-Go's, Fine Young Cannibals, R.E.M., Berlin, The Alarm, etc.

[@emerylapinski1553]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.R.S._Records

[@buxtehude6669]

And Gary Numan 👍

[@deanage69]

That one, in fact, says it's a recording of R.E.M. performing Pretty Persuasion

[@TeeVeeGames]

Came here to do just this. Good looking out. The label help shaped the music landscape of the 80s.

[@kevinr.3542]

"1980s air" smells like hairspray, moldy library books, and the inside of Joe Piscopo's Fierro.

[@slappy8941]

And Drakkar Noir.

[@l3p3]

Thanks, didn't know that.

[@extrahourinthepit]

*Fiero

[@BixbySnyder209]

The early vinyl records were made from shellac and shatter if you drop them, unlike the later ones made from plastic. To my knowledge anyhow. The floppy rom audio alternative was called a flexi disc, they gave them away as freebies with magazines etc, hence why they needed to be flexible. Fantastic stuff ❤

[@nick56677]

Yeah, the early records were 78 rpm records. Heavy and made of shellac. The plastic ones that replaced them were the 33 ⅓ rpm's.

[@xnamkcor]

Petty sure the "MO" disc was just M Disc, but the "O" was LG's M Disc logo.

[@raffitz]

The patent number is the same, which supports that.

[@MirekFe]

There was no letter 'O'. The spiral was a stylized symbol separating 'M' and 'Disc' instead of a dash. The spiral was originally shown set in stone, meant to visualize the company Millenniata (their original logo), the creators of this disc and the fact that the info is set in stone (since the M-Disc burn layer is made of a stone like material). Millenniata, from Millennium. Supposedly the 1000 year lifespan disc.

[@only257]

raffitz interesting 🧐

[@nucflashevent]

Beat me to it! 😜 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

[@IRMacGuyver]

Then why do so many video games call it an MO disc? Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, and Dino Crisis are just a couple I can think of that had Magneto Optical discs as key items.

[@williamrutherford553]

33:48 It's not an MO Disc, it's just called M Disc. It's a write-once optical disc, that one probably being DVD compatible. It's meant for archival, they use a special material "glassy carbon" so it can last for over 1000 years. The specific material is why the disc is partially see-through, they actually had to add the colour so the readers could distinguish it. That one has the branding for the original company, but now the discs and writers are sold by many companies. The only reason I know is because I own quite a few of them! Now they're made for Bluray not DVD, but they're a very cheap option for archiving important data longterm.

[@PSkullKidDnazen]

Are they still made? I happen to have a disc drive with the same logo, always wondered what was it about

[@ericsills6484]

Yeah, both of those are M Discs. If you look, the patent numbers are the same.

[@darthvader5300]

Glassy carbon are not new. Glassy carbon were invented for the aerospace industry in the mid-1970s. Glassy carbon is like a diamond so it WILL last beyond 1000 years.

[@apollomars1678]

wait, i wanted to ask...what did you store......but its porn, isnt it :-/

[@gurillamann6534]

Thank you for explaining

[@RichardCraig]

28:58 - I wonder if you've seen the 2 hour epic that is RCA Selectavision over at Technology Connections. That series deserves a damn award.

[@Larroseba]

the whole channed deserves a damn award

[@pizza4554V2]

This should be the top comment tbh. Shit's a must watch for most people here.

[@fkthewhat]

Richard Craig love that guy. Quirky as he is!

[@noahisamathnerd]

I’ve watched that entire series at least twice.

[@angelorusso3219]

Is that all it was... 2 hours? Seemed to be 17 parts of 2 hours each! Good content, but holy crap RCA just f'd themselves left and right.

[@dvweiss]

We were using D5 video tapes for broadcast tv at Sony Pictures up until even 2017-although the HDCAM-SR format was much more common. You are correct that the dial for 4ch/8ch is for audio config. D5 was ALWAYS a pain in the butt to work with, and the deck had to be calibrated for EVERY DIFFERENT TAPE.

[@petea8644]

Every time he says "I'm not sure what they were used for" the NSA youtube monitor calls US Nuclear command and says "Are you sure you wiped the missile codes from those old tapes before putting them on ebay?"

[@TheTattorack]

Hah, though considering how old those are, even if they contained missile codes they'd be long out dated.

[@Bradley_Dragon]

@@TheTattorack lol for like 10+ years... the missile codes for the majority of silos was 0000. no joke.

[@ColonelSandersLite]

@@Bradley_Dragon If I where a betting man, I would bet that they got changed to 1234.

[@mellonmarshall]

@@Bradley_Dragon I remember hearing that on QI once

[@tarkitarker0815]

@@TheTattorack from bush senior or even nixon to obama the nuclear codes did not change, obama did order to change them regularly sometime halfway through his presidency.

[@gatorkittygaming]

34:00 Someone has probably commented this but just in case - pretty sure the "MO Disc" is just an "M-Disc" with a spiral instead of a hyphen.

[@captianmorgan7627]

You can even see the same patent number on both disks. If you look it up the patent shows it being invented by Barry M. Lunt and Matthew R. Linford at Brigham Young University.

[@xVolta]

You have this exactly right. Same thing, different branding.

[@mrdarklight]

Yep. They're DVD discs made with different chemistry, and are said to be made to last 100's of years.

[@Kleinshooti]

That is true. I use M-Discs for storage, but you need a special burner to use them.

[@Kleinshooti]

@@mrdarklight actually 1000 years

[@jatigre1]

Oh man, I'm pretty sure one of those holds the Star Wars Christmas Special

[@swesleyc7]

RLM would be proud of this comment.

[@blakenelson4158]

There is no star wars christmas special its a horrid like! or was it just Horrid and people wish i was a lie.

[@Commrade-DOGE]

George Lucas: *loads E-11 blaster*

[@mctv6486]

Witch one?

[@karateswords11]

@@blakenelson4158 life day is the best holiday

[@TheRealJellyBomb]

As someone else pointed out, the big digital tape is D1, not SD1, and it was the thumbnail where you hold this that got me to watch the video. I used to work in a video duplicating plant, where different master tapes was copied to VHS (and, to a small extent, Hi8 for in-flight entertainment systems, and occasionally SVHS). The D1 was the mother of all the sources, just pristine quality and durability. I had actually forgotten about the suitcase. Still remember the satisfying sounds of the massive player loading up the tape, though. It just reeked quality and durability. DigiBeta (or Digital Betacam, not to be confused with Betamax) would give, IIRC, comparable quality, but with less reliability and more often with artefacts. So, the best digital source was the D1. We got some of the biggest titles on D1, while most titles where on analog tape reels... 🤔 Now, I wanna say those were called C-2s... But I'm not so sure. Either way, the number two was for inches, as in those spools were two-inch wide tape. I actually used to think the "1" in the D1 was due to the tape being one inch wide, but perhaps I'm mistaken. Now if you wanna examine a REALLY interesting old tape format, with the most massive machines to accompany it, see if you can find stuff on TMD VHS, where TMD stands for thermal magnetic duplication. I also worked with those, and they were fascinating. It's basically a VHS tape on a reel, except IIRC made of metal. You'd record onto it on a MASSIVE machine, about four feet tall and three by three feet footprint, top operated. And you'd record onto it using VHS technology, except mirrored. The tape would then be sent to these clean rooms with event bigger machines and people in clean suits, where the entire tape would be unreeled into the front of very tall (as in 8 feet or something like that) machines, visible like tape salad behind glass fronts. The tape would be welded at the ends to form a loop, and then mirrored at ridiculously high speeds (like 1000x or something like that) onto fresh, normal VHS tape in giant spools using lasers that would heat up the tapes to a certain temperature where the chrome particles in the normal tape would start to "float" and mirror the magnetic patterns in the TMD metal tape that would be unaffected by the temperature. It was fascinating. Also, there was a very odd disconnect between the super-high tech nature of the latter part of the process and the utter garbage that was the machine that created the metal "master" tape. It would so often flip out and create a bad master, and you wouldn't know it until after you'd created a ton of copies, and a tester had actually watched an entire copy 😂 Ah, the 90s, such fond memories 😂

[@StilltheOneTCF]

SD1 noto D1.

[@mbvideoselection]

That's fascinating stuff. I'd always assumed there had never been found a way to speed copy VHS. What you're describing is what in the audio world is called a "loop bin duplicator". I'd always assumed for video it wouldn't work because every documentary I've seen about videotape duplication facilities simply show huge banks of normal VHS recorders. As for what you call C2 however, must surely have actually been Quad(ruplex), which was the broadcast standard until the early 80s until 1-inch Type C took over (which your firm possibly may have called C-1?)

[@TheRealJellyBomb]

@@mbvideoselection You're right, they were C1. Really large machines, like reel-to-reel tape recorders, except for video. I was also into audio production at the time, having done a short education of sound mixing and mastering 😊 The TMD machines blew my mind, and still do 😊 We had a whole department with clean-suit employees that were responsible for duplicating them onto consumer VHS. The only company not using TMD ever, was Disney, and I remember that the company we worked for had created a dedicated site just to avoid accidentally copying porn onto Disney tapes as they were THAT big, and it HAD already happened 😂 I was just 19 at the time.

[@imabigsandwich1292]

The Sony SD-1 tapes at 13:08 was one of the first digital format ever made, it's a tape meant to be used in the now obsolete D-1 video format, where it stored 100gb of data in 1989! it stored uncomporessed 4:2:2 digital component video, which meant that it was very big in file size, and very expensive as a media format, but extremely high quality since there were no compression applied onto it, it was largely replaced by formats like d2, d3, d4, d5 and later digibeta, which digibeta does a mild intra frame compression and records video at 10bit 4:2:2 at a much smaller cassette size and longer runtime.

[@citricdolphin]

I'd LOVE to see the "FloppyROM" in action. These kinds of products that seems like a bad idea are super fascinating to me.

[@blinkinglightsandsmokingcaps]

UK computer magazines published these from time to time, and I acquired at least three of them. Getting them to work was somewhat tricky, requiring several attempts at dubbing the record to cassette, if they worked at all. One failed to dub at all, whilst the software on another was of such poor quality I wish I hadn't bothered.

[@scorbiot]

"I think Techmoan made a good video about CED" - well yeah, but what if you want five? Technology Connections has got you covered!

[@kenlin121]

Technology Connections also made good videos about laser disk, DVD-RAM, disposable disks, and many others.

[@imrustyokay]

AND The Oddity Archive!

[@ltvg]

@@imrustyokay YEAH, he has very good content

[@ProjectV95]

@@QuarTheDev wait what?

[@riceexe]

@@QuarTheDev I've never heard that side of him, tell me more

[@johansmolinski]

Very informative, indeed! Though, the Famicom Disk System would be worth mentioning by the EIGHT BIT GUY, don't you think? ;)

[@nakyer]

When you pulled the two 5.25" discs out thru the center, I yelped. I don't ever want to see anyone do that again!

[@wendyokoopa7048]

Same

[@tolentarpay5464]

Amen to that...

[@_zoinks2554]

The 8-Bit Barbarian

[@HubrisInc]

I cried

[@jacksong6226]

I mean if he opened it gently he would have damaged it and wasn’t going to put it back together anyways

[@cromulentcommodore5896]

12:00 that's R.E.M. pretty persuasion. I.R.S. Records was the record label.

[@digitalman01010]

Came here to say this too. Could be the music video. =)

[@hainkm]

I still have a working UMatic player... let's archive it!

[@bustosricky]

That's a huge cassette in the thumbnail. Captured my interest immediately.

[@noahisamathnerd]

bustosricky True that. But who am I kidding? I always watch his videos.

[@morganb900]

i didnt even look at the thumbnail lol just like yay a new video!

[@thenewbgamer6416]

Me too.

[@cjhammel]

Those tape were used in the Sony DIR-1000 series drives and held up to 100GB used for data archive/backups/video Instrumentation storage and is from the mid 1990's.

[@jacobdavenport7338]

Same

[@recursiveidentity]

I love the floppy rom! I remember the Bloom County Comics had a little record in one of their books like this, but not with code obviously! Also I remember going to my dad's work back in the mid 70's and he was using punch cards for his programs.

[@fugenas]

"...here it says "DO NOT OPEN", well i'll open it anyway." I loved this part. It made my day better. Thank you.

[@Jivvi]

At least he didn't touch it, lol.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

When you'Re bored and you play with the door on your floppy drives.

[@hywelw]

The SD1 Cassette was used for Sony's D1 digital video format - I believe the first professional commercial digital format generally available (we're talking early-mid 1990s) that recorded component video digitally and uncompressed. We had 5 of these working at the BBC Research & Development when I worked there. For the version we had, each video recorder was about the size of a small refrigerator (though the tape transport section could be removed with the bottom half stored a short distance away so it looked about the size of a normal commercial professional video recorder, but with a much bigger gap for the tape cassette). There were 2 tape sizes - the ones you show (which came it it's own carrier box as you show) - this stored 90+3 minutes uncompressed video and there was a smaller sized tape (same thickness but slightly larger than a VHS) which stored up to 30 minutes of uncompressed video (actually 34 minutes IIRC as Sony always added a couple of minutes to broadcast standard tapes) depending on how much tape was included in the first place. Both tapes were EXCEPTIONALLY expensive to buy compared to modern tape formats, as you can probably imagine! As I said, it was uncompressed (no video compression whatsoever) so at the BBC we combined 4 of these to create the world's first uncompressed digital HD format - this was back when the BBC were experimenting with HD being double the height of the PAL 575 format so the video format for these was 1250 lines - in the end the UK went with the US 1050 line format. The BBC also invented a compressed HD format that compressed a 1250 line image onto a single tape (using a 1U rack mounted unit) - this JUST was light enough (between power the tape recorder and the heavy early digital HD cameras) to be able to take onto a helicopter to get the first digital HD recordings from a helicopter! While compressed, each frame contained a single compressed frame, thus enabling full editing by frame (and the format even included an uncompressed tiny little representation of the compressed HD image in the centre of the screen, allowing editing without having to decode into HD!) For reference, the D1 format was used for a lot longer than some other standards as a source tape due to its uncompressed nature - look at very early DVD discs - they sometimes displayed their source tape format on the label - D1 on the label often indicated that the original video came off one of these monsters (though the DVD itself is of course compressed).

[@mikiex]

I worked for Sony Music around that time and as you say they were used as masters. All Sony DVDs/VHS were mastered from D1, you never forget seeing a cassette that big :)

[@happylemming6343]

I just searched about the SD-1 cassette and, apparently, it was also used by CERN computers

[@dgodiex]

Awesome, I got one of these as a present a few weeks ago, in pristine state and in its own suitcase. Had no idea they existed, and what they used them for. Thanks for the explanation. The size is amazing!

[@yetidynamics]

I vaguely remember seeing one of those giant sony cassettes playing Terminator 2 in HD at an HDTV demonstration at a computer fair

[@specialK_hvac]

When i saw the format size thats immediately what I thought it would be for is movies

[@mikecumbo7531]

Sorry, the SD-1 was a standard def tape. Search for “D1 video recorder”. They were used mostly in edit suites. The Maxell tape was also standard def, D5 format. Basically Panasonic’s attempt to compete with Sony’s D1 format.

[@mattjames4126]

@@mikecumbo7531 I also used D-1 to master VHS tapes in my first job outta college... nothing like the sound of 3000 vhs decks ejecting simultaneously...

[@routemaster19]

Yes - these were primarily used by film production companies as intermediate or duplication masters for the home video market - but they were Standard Definition. They got superseded by the D2 - slightly smaller and then the D3 (same as the Maxell cassette which was a D5 (more compressed). There was no D4 because - I was told - in Japanese culture the number 4 is considered unlucky. These were all used late 1990's to early 2000 before High Def became a thing. Working in a professional dubbing facility we had to have so many different machines to play all these formats - all had their own foibles you had to learn to get them to work at their best. Back then we still used 2" Quad reel to reel video, 1" C reel to reel video, Umatic (Lo-band and Hi-Band), Beta SP, Beta SX, Digi-Beta, mini-DV, DV-Cam, HDV, DVX-Pro & HDVX-Pro. We also created high speed duplication masters for VHS called Mirror Mothers which were reel-reel tape that spun incredibly fast printing the media on to huge spools of VHS tape which then got cut up and spooled in to the VHS Cassette shells. Back in the TV world Sony up until very recently still used those "failed" 23Gb and 50Gb blu-ray cartridges for one of their most important camcorder ranges - the XD-Cam. Now superseded by all the solid state formats out there. With the wipe and re-use facility that these Solid state formats encourage - the concept of archiving rushes is becoming more esoteric. They get hived off on to various drives throughout a production and many end up getting lost or wiped which could create a problem years down the line should they be needed again. Indeed the speed at which formats are born and then become obsolete does not bode well for future playback of many of these media.

[@GringoXalapeno]

Might as well put 35 mm film instead of tape in the cassette as big as it is

[@ghostein.stereo]

5:00 I had bought a bundle from a musician and it included something like this. I remember being so confused as to why it felt like that. Nice to know the artist knows about his history.

[@DJPeterJames]

I love that we are still talking about the “War Games” film.

[@awilliams1701]

He's the reason why I watched war games. lol I had never seen it. I saw it last year some time after he mentioned it in a video. Interesting movie, but soooooo much of it was so implausible that I was cringing at times.

[@The8BitGuy]

You know, the funny thing is when I first saw the movie in 1983, I was only 8 years old and I too cringed at some of the scenes and complained to everyone about how unrealistic it was. However, the irony is looking back, it is actually one of the most realistic "hacker" movies ever made. That may be more of a testament to how BAD the rest are, not so much how accurate this one was.

[@joey_after_midnight]

@@The8BitGuy I graduated High School in 1983 and I'm pretty sure Daemon dialing didn't come into popular use until the BBS was invented with FIDO net to transfer email until much later around 1987 or 1990. At Texas A&M we had dialup modem banks in 1983 only a few had a SLIP connection the rest were ASCII terminals. As a student I begged for more SLIP lines.. and they kept telling me "why would you want a tcp connection?" Wylbur was a much better "useful" application than things like Pegasus or Minuet.. FTP was only for milnet guys.. who want that?

[@wumpusthehunted2628]

I always found the way WOPR/Joshua kept talking far, far away from his voice synthesizer hardware was one of the worst bits. I later learned that a significant fraction ( probably a majority of the population, certainly in 1983 simply will not read what is on a computer screen unless they absolutely have to (and not always then). Seems the makers of that movie already knew things UI designers would struggle to learn. So even if he couldn't talk, that voice had to follow him so the audience could know what was going on.

[@angelorusso3219]

WarGames really set my path into the computer field. While it was playing on the era of nuclear war, missiles, and the emerging home computer systems, it did make a great movie. It showed great imagination as to what computers could evolve to (and of course which we have been through and now way surpassed). I've heard the representation of NORAD was as much accurate as inaccurate. We all know the multitude of screens were TV's playing video and not interactive as shown. The doors into NORAD are that big, but there are 2, not 1 as portrayed. Overall, it was a movie for it's time and I think still holds up today to not look cheezy even though there is some old technology shown in the movie. It had a good comedic, dramatic, and philisophical pulse.

[@johnmorgan1629]

The punch card, had been around for over 100 years, by the 1920's, being used on Jaquard looms for weaving patterns. They could be so intricate, that they could be used to produce woven portraits of people, or landscapes. One such portrait, being of the inventor of the process himself, Joseph-Marie Jaquard (1752-1834).

[@Allen.Christian]

Punch cards and even punch paper tape existed and were in use in looms before Jaquard was even born (as early as the 1720s for cards and 1740s for tape). Jaquard's machine was just more complex and had a bigger impact on the industry than previous uses. He's largely associated as the originator because his system was actually binary, which is of course what made it useful for computing systems.

[@apollomars1678]

@@Allen.Christian yep, if it is about math systems by mechanical devices, so the core of a punch card, we would rather have to simply look at astronomy and their astrolabia (pl.), who were in history first found around 2300 years in the past and they were probably even older and from india, while others had similar systems to understand stars in other cultures, but they were not dominant. its basicly a fancy code for Astronomical coordinate systems.....if you hate yourself even more than IT nerds.

[@johndododoe1411]

The card shown is an 80 character Holerith card as used in mechanical card sorting and searching machines. An operator would set the machine to search for cards with special field values, such as a 4 in the column for decade of birth and a B in the column for race, then the machine could find the cards for US citizens due specific compensation for the slavery laws before the US civil war. Infamously that compensation was never paid and instead Germany used the machines to find population groups to rob and kill in their territory.

[@deathsniper666]

For anyone else that's curious, the Sony SD-1 cassette (the huge one) was used to record data from the NA49 experiment conducted at CERN, which investigated reactions caused by the collisions of various heavy ions. It had a 100GB storage capacity, and was used in a Sony DMS-24. Some pretty interesting technical information about the hardware setup and how/why that cassette was used can be found here: books.google.ca/books?id=Cn3FCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA245&lpg=PA245&dq=sony+dms-24&source=bl&ots=mSW4_a28OU&sig=ACfU3U08AHIgVmx6pLgV07mYnULstNDb-g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB7pj8q9DpAhUCVt8KHTUvD1QQ6AEwDnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=sony%20dms-24&f=false

[@EuanWhitehead]

Brilliant

[@alantelles7379]

I may be wrong but it had a 1,3 Km tape length??

[@murchmurch7678]

Internet.... you are amazing.

[@AlistairKiwi]

I started using computers in 1977 when I was 13. We didn't have the 8" disks, only cassette tapes. It took 30 mins for the smallest program to load. We got the 8" disks in 1978 and they were a miracle! Fast loading of apps and data. It was just a year or two before we got the .25" disks - & they were amazing. Just as everything that suddenly opened up our computational abilities in the '70s seems so ludicrous today, so will all the latest innovations of today seem in 40-50 years from now. But, enjoy the heck while you're still interested in it!

[@Luscious3174]

Gotta love Sony for all their proprietary formats over the years - they are definitely an innovator. Would have been fun to see you place the humongous SD-1 tape next to their MicroMV for size comparison LOL

[@ianscottorosano214]

12:07 I.R.S. was a record label, they had bands such as REM and the Bolshoi.

[@MessalineApghar]

For a while Steppenwolf was on IRS too

[@pryingeyes1551]

If you look on the label, to the left of the logo, also @12:07, you can see it's the music video for REM's "Pretty Persuasion". Maybe it was sent to MTV originally.

[@bigbaddms]

The gogos too!

[@rommix0]

and also Go-Go's and Wall of Voodoo.

[@craigteanelson176]

I work in archiving and a lot of our I.R.S. U-matic tapes are pretty hard to read now. But I laughed when he didn't recognize a logo I see at work pretty regularly

[@mcbfilms22]

I took a geology class in college, and the professor was still using a film projector to show very old geology films from the 1960’s and 70’s. I should mention that I took this class in 2003!!!

[@logiciananimal]

Geologists *are* used to the very old ;)

[@moconnell663]

My art history professor insisted on using terrible 35mm slides she shot herself instead of high-quality PowerPoint in 2008...

[@spazkong]

Well, I'm suitably impressed. Compiling this lot must have been a monumental task. Nicely done!

[@SteveColen]

That HUGE tape is what we use to call "D1" or "D1 Suitcase" and its used to store 4:2:2 digital video. You would not believe how good things looked on it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony)

[@myleslangshaw4237]

Steve Colen They hold around 100GB, right?

[@philippebrodier]

Looking very good indeed, when you don't have tracking problems with it ! That's one of the reasons why the D1 VCR never goes broadcast. D2 tapes are the same size but offer only composite video instead.

[@AsbestosMuffins]

this is the cool thing about putting a video on the internet like this, you're bound to find at least one person who knows the magic words needed to find out what the heck you even have. just having a name or model number of the machine that uses it is worlds easier than trying to search "Very big sony tape"

[@jonathancook4022]

I can confirm the use of these Sony D1 tapes for digital video because I remember using them in the early 2000's at Kendal Mountain Film Festival, although as soon as BlueRay and Later USB Media players arrived, they disapeared quickly. While the 'resolution' was only slightly better than VHS, it was the sharpness of the video, clarity and lack of artifacts that made this the video formatt of choice for the festival while more ameature film productions has to deal with Sony Betavideo which was 2nd best. Fast forward to 2019/2020 and the festival now exclusively uses films loaded onto USB sticks or SD cards and played back with USB media players, thru media racks and onto 4K Christie projectors or some form of LED screen.

[@marcpearson2913]

The one he has (an SD1) is the data specific version that was used in backing up servers. The video version had 3 sizes (D1, L/M/S) and the SD1 had 2 sizes (L/M) the larger of which was 100GB uncompressed.

[@Dresdenstl]

Gotta love this old media logic. "It's like a cassette tape...but huge!" "It's like a floppy disc...but huge!" "It's like a CD...but huge!" I would love to see what's on some of these. It would be like media archaeology.

[@Hoopydoo]

In 100 years, media archeology will absolutely be a thing...

[@HelloKittyFanMan.]

That's not it, because difference in size doesn't make it like that thing but ______ size. It IS that thing... at _that_ size.

[@kandigloss6438]

@@Hoopydoo It already is

[@andyhello23]

Remember, for them, the big size came first.

[@titmouse-distribution]

XD

[@WildkatPhoto]

IRS is/was a record label. REM, the GoGos and Fine Young Cannibals (among others) were all big acts for I.R.S. The paper tape brought back memories for me. Back in ancient times (1980s) I used a digital encryption device that looked like a shrunken down Tandy 100. it has an acoustic coupler modem and could be strapped on to either a phone or a push to talk FM radio to send relatively long messages (roughly one page max). The encryption key came on punch tape that you would pull out from a sealed plastic container that was the size of a disposable scotch tape dispenser. After feeding it into the machine I had to burn the tape. It was made of flash paper so that was an adventure in not being burned myself. I had to wear the tape dispenser around my neck for weeks at a time in the field unless we had access to a safe.

[@einsteinx2]

That’s really interesting. Were you in the military? I’d love to hear more about that device and what it was used for! (assuming it’s not classified haha)

[@WildkatPhoto]

@@einsteinx2 Still am. Ive been googleing around and I cant find it. I have a coworker who was doing similar stuff at the time and I will ask him if he remembers the name of it. It was a pretty amazing bit of gear at the time. This was in the 286 era. i had a Zenith PC AT clone at work. 40MB hard drive seemed like all the storage anyone could ever need. Did most of my work in PC Write until we got a legit copy of WordStar. Good times.

[@marsilies]

The "Video 120" cassette is part of what's called the "VX" videocassette format from Matsushita (aka Panasonic), released in the US under the Quasar name. the US VCR was the Quasar VR-1000 (based on the Panasonic VX-2000). The tapes were also known as VC100 and VC120, indicating the number of minutes of recording on each.