voidstar78
Veteran Member
I know the general answer to the question: IBM wasn't sure how quickly disk drives would become affordable, or if consumers would even adopt them at all (as standards and capability were evolving quickly - even the initial 160KB disk format was a little rough around the edges, though was quickly eclipsed by the 360KB standard). If production of floppy drives and or floppy disk media was somehow disrupted (and made too expensive too home/office users), then there would be a Plan B to load/store stuff from tape.
My question is more this: why couldn't tape support have been provided through the serial port? Isn't a tape storage basically equivalent to about 300 to 2400 baud, which by 1981 could be matched by a serial port? Or maybe it could be done, but the R&D time to have Cassette BASIC support such a thing would have taken too long? (in terms of getting the 5150 on the market) Or maybe it was since cassette to 9-pin cables already existed in plenty, nobody wanted to try making new cassette to serial cables?
Can the 9-pin cassette connector be thought of as a specialized serial connection? In that perspective, maybe it is cheaper/easier to have onboard support for the 9-pin connector, rather than trying to add a 2nd serial port.
My question is more this: why couldn't tape support have been provided through the serial port? Isn't a tape storage basically equivalent to about 300 to 2400 baud, which by 1981 could be matched by a serial port? Or maybe it could be done, but the R&D time to have Cassette BASIC support such a thing would have taken too long? (in terms of getting the 5150 on the market) Or maybe it was since cassette to 9-pin cables already existed in plenty, nobody wanted to try making new cassette to serial cables?
Can the 9-pin cassette connector be thought of as a specialized serial connection? In that perspective, maybe it is cheaper/easier to have onboard support for the 9-pin connector, rather than trying to add a 2nd serial port.