Summit Trainer Muscles Used

remains difficult for me to imagine a minicomputer-70s without magnetic tapes (tapes). I've made up my mind that my Heritage / 1 will use "virtual tapes" (V-TAPE), ie 3.5-inch diskettes Súmula tapes, and the reasons are: (1) Available-but on its way to extinction - (2) I feel that with a floppy provides the same "emotional relationship" with the tapes, (3) Capacity and speed in access.

But (despite the fact that Heritage / 1 was not born yet), the idea of \u200b\u200busing "belt of truth" is not apart of my head. I often feel to advance ideas on the design of software, especially software and system management applications for a Heritage / 1 Batch system working. And always, unfailingly, I think tapes with all its limitations, such as lack of direction and inability to insert records in the middle of the tape. Would these problems, the same flavor if faced with diskettes, even "virtual tapes" that these be?

The answer is a resounding "no", and that is why I launched myself to imagine the real practical use of tapes as the primary means of storage at Heritage / 1. The diskettes could use them too (below) but as disk, not tape.

The great problem of "true tape" is on availability, specialty was because useful for running applications, I need more than one (say, eight). And it is with those sights that I turned my attention to machines VHS video-cassette players. Looking

project, these machines have the following advantages:

1 .- They are extremely cheap these days for being in the process of extinction.
2 .- The transport mechanism is inherently electronically controlled. 3 .- Mayor
bandwidth that an audio recorder and, consequently, reduced access time data. 4 .-
VHS cassette can be so "caring" as the diskette or tape himself.

Utilizazar a VHS cassette player as a storage project itself, but I did not want to wait to have Heritage list / 1, but tackle it immediately (paralalamente) in order to access it from my PC Linux during its development.

It's an experiment, not a product. The goal is to develop techniques that allow me to make a decent storage Heritage / 1 come the time. The project is interesting in itself because they involve many topics like these:

- Consolidation phase (on tape). And the decoding, of course.

- Using PLLs (for the purpose above.)

- Error Correction (CRC). Without it is impossible to work with magnetic media.

- Government of transport (although this will be easy since most is done on the machine).

- Serial communication (RS-232) from Linux to an external device (the tape drive, in this case).

- Development of "device drivers" for Heritage / 1 (originally written as PHP or C applications on my Linux PC).

- A long list. Eventually

not be idle to access VHS tapes from my Linux PC as this could be a bridge for the exchange of information. For example, programs for Heritage / 1 will be processed using my PC, so you can save the resulting code on tape directly from my PC (and then upload from tape to Heritage / 1) is a good thing.