This was cutting edge tech… I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs…

  • D_C@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    Wooo, look at hoity toity FancyPants over here with their screwdriver. All we could afford to fix our cassette tapes was a pencil. And a blunt pencil at that. And it was probably stolen from school!! Screwdrivers indeed!

    • hessenjunge@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 days ago

      The screwdriver is not for the tape. It’s for adjusting the audio head so it can pick up the data on the tape.

      When someone gave you a tape with some nice games on it there was a near 100% chance you needed to adjust your datasette to read them.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Exactly. On the long run, we settled down on what we called a common calibration, a setting that allowed all of us locals to exchange tapes without constant tweaking.

      • umbraroze@slrpnk.net
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        4 days ago

        The tape drive has a hole on the top for adjusting the azimuth, but one of my friends basically just removed the top cover entirely for easier access to the screw. I did that too for some particularly tricky tapes.

        Another of my friends had basically an unearthly knack of adjusting this stuff. Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it’d work. Which makes no sense.

        This was all a kind of mysterious part of the Commodore 64 culture to me. Because I had a floppy drive and that’s what I obviously preferred to use.