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1200-Baud Archeology

Posted by kdawson on from the when-men-were-men-and-interpreters-ran-in-4k dept.

jamie found this singularly geeky article on reconstructing Apple I BASIC from a cassette tape. It claims to offer the first confirmed perfect dump (BIN) of the 4096 bytes of this venerable interpreter. Terrific fun for the whole family. "The Apple I is extremely rare. Only 200 were built, and less than 100 are believed to be in existence. Neither Steve nor Woz own an Apple I any more, and neither does Apple Inc. The cassettes are even rarer, as not every Apple I came with one... So here is how to decode the signal. Let us first open the audio file in Audacity and look at the waveform... It is now time to write a small program to measure and dump the width of the pulses."

5 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Teach it! by VincenzoRomano · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think that at least the basic interpreter should be taught to the new generations.
    They don't feel confortable enough in less than 1 GB, what if they had just 4 KB?

    --
    Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
    For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
    1. Re:Teach it! by Digital+Vomit · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How long is copyright nowdays?

      Functionally "forever".

      --
      Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
    2. Re:Teach it! by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If Apple tried to sue, Woz would likely pay for your defense.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
  2. Re:Alternative tools by lpontiac · · Score: 4, Insightful

    the summary makes me think he made a mountain from a molehill.

    I think the emphasis is more on the historical significance, given the rarity of the tapes and the fact that the only digitised copy floating about has been patched.

  3. Re:Alternative tools by linhux · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When I was a teenager, I used to decode FAT tables and directory structures by hand, using pen and paper and printouts from a raw hex dump of a hard disk. I didn't do this because there was a problem needed to be solved; I knew what was on the disk and there sure were plenty of tools to read the data (like MS-DOS). But it was a fun challenge and I learned how FAT worked.

    I can see how this is a similar challenge. It's nothing more than a geeky sudoku.