Get a load of this, before floppy disks we use to store data on cassette tapes. Yes, plain old audio cassette tapes.

I have a childhood memory of playing “Hunt the Wumpus” game from cassette

And yes, I am *that* old

Yeah, well, we'd store our data as holes punched in cardboard and paper.

True, but I don’t think there were ever home computers with punch card readers.

Asr33 with an S100 box, though.

Yeah that's a smidge before my time. I still have some punch cards in a box somewhere though that a friend gave me.

I remember booting up the Apple II (lle?) by playing a tape deck.

I remember interning in an office with a room full of monstrously tall and deep reel-to-reel machines.

I actually remember that one! we had a TI-99 in our house that played a text-based RPG through one of those cassette tapes. I still had no idea about the floppy disk trick though.

Bonus point: if the computer was old enough you had to connected the headphone port from a regular cassette player. Dedicated data cassette players came later.

LOAD PRESS PLAY ON TAPE

Which also had read/write notches.

*Ahem* (extreme nerd voice) tape is still used for long-term data storage in some businesses. It’s a remarkably stable medium if you treat it right.

That is true. However nobody is using cassette tapes, and they certainly aren’t storing data as analog audio.

I've worked for governments who use it for long-term backups of important data. In the last decade. Nifty thing, tape.

I haven't been following him for all that long but I'm sensing this is @kenwhite.bsky.social in a nutshell.