
Originally Posted by
Jeff_Birt
I was thinking about the 4 track cassette deck a friend of mine had back in the 1980's. He was into music and it let him mix his songs in his home studio. Instead of the normal dual section read/write head (for stereo) the head had four sections using both sets of tracks from the 'front' and 'back' of the tape.
Doing a bit of research I found out that the big reel-to-reel tape systems on mainframe type computers used multiple tracks, for example the IBM System 360 was a 9 track, 8 data bits and 1 parity bit. I then got to wondering if any manufacturer had ever used a multi-track system for cassette (compact audio type cassettes) that were used on the 'home' computers back in the day. Using a 4 track head might have been much more costly as they were not really a commodity item but a stereo (two track) head would have been fairly inexpensive. You would have more required in the drives electronics but the mechanics would be the same.
It seems it would have been a fairly easy way to increase the speed and/or reliability of cassette tape storage. In wondering how such a two track system might have been implemented the most obvious idea would be to read/write two bits at a time. But, you could also invert and or invert/delay the second track so that you have a crude way to detect errors or perhaps you could them read/write faster as the data would be redundant and you would not need as long a bit time?
Anyhow, just thinking out loud and wondering what sort of multi-track tape systems there might have been other than for IBM sized machines.
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