http://technology.niagarac.on.ca/people/mcsele/OhioScientifi... seems like a nice and detailed summary of what these machines were like and where they fit in the market. I don't think I'd heard more than the name before.

Hard to believe that this item hasn't been rated more interesting. That is as neat a hack as anything!

It's neat but not that unusual, people have been writing and decoding these tapes for fun or because they wanted to recover things from them for years and years. This one is also quite recent and in the other direction - but it recovers an interesting nerdhistorical artifact -

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=32

My housemate and I did this for Tandy Color Computer cassettes a while back. If I recall correctly, a binary 0 was a certain duration of 1200Hz sine waves, and a binary 1 was the same duration of 2400Hz sine waves. The circuitry counted zero crossings over time, which made it fairly resilient to noise.

And yes, plugging the cassette aux in cable to the headphone jack of a Macbook and transferring code through it was really fun. :)

Took me a while to remember why I had been on that page before.

It's in the blogroll of the console hacking elite. (Wii side.)

Newer posts still interesting, glad to see other insane people still functioning (re: the vending machine change experiment).

This is amazing.