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1200-Baud Archeology
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."
If Apple tried to sue, Woz would likely pay for your defense.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.