So, an expensive ($27.99 is $151 in today’s dollars.) machine to hook up but due to the dropping costs of blank cassettes, themselves manufactured in the millions to satisfy a range of customers, you could now tinker and toy on these computer kits and save out your digital creations to a medium with a fairly high chance of recovering them again.
Combine the simplicity of the programs involved, the often-cheap tape medium being bought, and the use of labelmakers to create adhesive labels to describe the inside program, and you get a very memorable, very evocative 1970s-1980s aesthetic that will either confuse the new or warm the heart of the old:
As a side note on our introductory tour, it would be possible to phone number library save multiple programs on these tapes, but you had to be very careful about where on the tape counter each program was placed, so your works didn’t override each other, an art far above the head of the impatient or unwilling to rewind to the beginning of the tape and carefully watch a rising counter number to find fresh fields of data.
And the result, not obvious otherwise, are these glyphs providing you a possibly cryptic map of “dumps” (writing of the programs into the tape, following the counter as you would go). Note how in the label, a failed/broken program has to be left where it is on the tape; a combination of hearing the old program under an overwritten one, as well as not being able to predict how many feet down the tape a new program will take, means the road to data dumps is littered with broken memories.