Retailers would often use these starter kits as a marketing ploy. The wholesale price was very low and they would offer them for free when you bought a VCR, claiming that they were giving you $67.95 in free accessories even though nobody would have ever paid that much in reality.
Or sell it at a "deep discount" for $30, kind of like the $40 Best Buy HDMI cables. :) Recoton though, absolutely remember that name from back then, they had all kinds of sketchy-looking A/V accessories.
As a kid in the 80s I remember VHS stuff being prohibitively expensive back then. I think early blank VHS cassettes were $10-15 EACH in 80's money, so as a kids we were always trying to get our hands on cheap tapes by scrounging those instructional VHS tapes nobody kept or wanted and then using the scotch-tape over the hole trick to record over them. A lot of people these days don't remember or were too young to know how insanely expensive video equipment was when it first came out. I wasn't able to afford a used camcorder until the mid 90s, and when we were kids in the 80s it was still common to use 8mm and super 8 film camera because even though film was expensive, camcorders cost more than good used cars.
New blank tapes were like gold... there was nothing more agonizing than looking for something you had recorded, only to discover someone had taped over it because you were out of blanks. One year my dad used up all of our tapes to record the entire America's Cup sailboat race and erased all manner of things.
VHS was different in Europe and the UK. We only had two speeds to record at, not three, SP and LP which doubled the time and halved the quality, but then again we had the PAL system with more lines to record. Tapes could be bought at pretty much any length from half an hour upwards at half hour increments, but the most common were E120, E180, and E240 minute tapes. Sometimes companies did 'buy three hour tapes and get half an hour free' promotions and I had a couple of E210s. At one point they thinned down the tape so much that they started cramming 5 hour tapes into a shell, E300s, but most manufacturers would state that 4 hour tapes were the max for their machines. But imagine 10 hours of LP content on an E300 tape! When we first got a player, pretty late in '87, single tapes were still around £5 each, and for the first year I nursed three tapes through multiple recordings. But pretty soon the price for blank tapes plummeted, and we'd get multipacks, 4 for £10 and so forth. We'd usually get Scotch (re-record not fade away) because of their lifetime guarantee. I made use of that a few times to get replacement tapes when they'd get creased. Had a couple hundred blank tapes for timeshifting at one point, down to just a handful of home movies now. All meticulously backed up to DVD-R, but that's another story.
I did have a 14.4K modem at one point. I bought it in '92 when my roommate graduated, and took his 9.6K with him. It seemed awesomely fast at the time!
I suspect that you would use the "Scrapbook" application if you wanted to make pictures, it seems pretty unlikely that Sharp would make the paint tools only for making a personalized startup picture. I would also assume that you could insert drawings into documents in the wordprocessor application.
Triclorotrifluoroethane was one of those pesky chemicals we used to use in refrigeration that depleted the ozone layer. It was also used as a mild cleaning solvent for metals and plastics and even as a dry cleaning solvent. Versatile but very bad stuff like most fluorocarbons I suppose.
I worked at hollywood video and I spliced tapes all the time. They were damaged and wouldn't play. We'd just cut the damaged section off and had a special splicing kit. We even had leader only casettes. It's maybe 1 meter of leader. No magnetic tape. I had one that was completely crushed. I replaced both reels and the shell. The only down side to splicing is you get a glitch where the splice happens. But you barely notice it. We played them back in our own VCR. No issues. No customers ever complained.
@@m.k.8158 with the kit we had it made a perfect splice every time. No overlapping of the tape. It actually locks down the tape before you make the cut.
@@awilliams1701 Yeah I bet they were worried about people splicing tapes using scotch tape like you used to do with audio tape. I could see that peeling off and getting on the video drum...
BASF VHS tapes, dates well when black package (HG) says "Germany" and one with silver package says "W. Germany". So silver package is pre-1990 and black is post-1990.
Considering the 1984 date on the box, though, it's debatable that they weren't just being nonspecific, like how stuff that's "Made in Korea" isn't actually from before the Korean War (or after some hypothetical future reunification).
I had a Casio BOSS diary back in 96-97. I've even made an interface to connect to PC and transfer data. It was very useful for my job back then. Tasks and reminders mostly. I still have a couple of Sharp / Casio smaller digital diaries around in my collection.
Hi Adrian, have you ever considered putting chapter markers in longer videos where you cover numerous different subjects in a single video? It would make it easier for people to jump to parts of the video that interest them most. Thanks.
2:53 the thing that blows my mind about weather in Portland is that you can start out by driving in rain in SE (Milwalkie, Moreland, Sellwood), get out past 185th, get the car covered in snow out there, and drive back to SE to discover that it never stopped raining. But meanwhile, you head _west_ to the hills out past Banks or McMinnville and its icy winter conditions.
Merry Christmas, Adrian! You're never too old to learn, and I've learned quite a few things from you this year. Thank you for making 2024 fun, and here's to future videos in 2025 🥳
I can confirm the HP 100LX and 200LX are DOS based, specifically MS-DOS 5.0. They use a SoC based on the 80186 at around 7.9 MHz with 640k of conventional RAM. The really cool thing is they have 640x200 displays and a single PC Card slot that supports SRAM, Flash Memory, and modem cards. My own 200LX has a 32MB card and I've got it connected to a Serial to Wifi adapter to get it online. It even runs Planet X3!
Merry Christmas, Adrian and other viewers! 🎄 It's hard to believe, but I found ADB in December 2019, so I'm watching this channel for 5 years now! Thank you for all this countless hours!
That makes sense, since a usual thing you'd _want_ it to break down _is_ carbon build up from arcing contacts and things, so that differentiation is probably important.
@@moosemaimer If it's a potentiometer you should probably use the fader lube Deox-IT. If it's a rheostat any contact cleaner will work. It's easy enough to do a Google Image Search to see what the different control parts look like.
I think D5 and F5 are the same except F5 has more and different oil. I haven't had either one dissolving parts, F just feels better for faders. According to the manufacturer: "Using the DeoxIT D5 on the rotary pots is fine. DeoxIT Fader is mostly used on linear faders"
17:00, maple syrup, sugar, treats - I grew up in upstate NY, and my town had a maple syrup/sugar operation in it called Ye Old Sugar House. It was pretty much as you described, with the metal taps in the trees, collection buckets hanging beneath, and workers emptying the buckets into some sort of mobile collector (maybe in wheelbarrows or some sort of cart or even a small tractor, because the place was located in the center of many square miles of forest full of maple trees, so carrying one bucket at a time would've been quite a lot of work, not to mention the problem of trying not to spill any), and pouring it into a large, elevated tank. The tank had a movable trough that would send sap on demand to the boiler where the maple syrup and sugar were made. Like where you grew up, Ye Olde Sugar House was open to tourists and school trips, and I remember going several times. At the end, they would give us a small cup (probably something like a 3oz bathroom cup) that was maybe 1/4 full of maple syrup for us to taste. As a kid, I found the concentration of the syrup overwhelming. As I got older, though, I came to love real maple syrup on pancakes, waffles and in things. It took me longer to acquire a taste for maple sugar, but eventually I did. Since it was locally produced, we always had a container of real maple syrup in the house when I was growing up, and I still keep a bottle of it in the house. Like you, I find artificial maple-flavored syrups to be no substitute for the real thing. In fact, I won't even use them -- to me they're just gross. 26:15, video starter system - In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Recoton was a company known for a lot of audio and video tape accessories, including storage units, cleaning kits and even blank cassettes. I wouldn't be surprised if someone, somewhere actually paid $67.95 for that kit. Until the mid to late 1980s, VCRs were still a fairly new product. A lot of people were still using their first. They had paid a lot of money for those first VCRs, and had no idea how to maintain them. There was also no Internet yet, so not a lot of places to turn for good information about such things. Your best source of maintenance information was usually the dealer where you bought your VCR, and that dealer probably had shelves full of various cleaning and maintenance kits, so they hardly had an incentive to tell you, "Oh, no, you don't need this...". People who didn't know better would just pull out the wallet and buy whatever was there at whatever the cost. People who took the trouble to try to learn about the technology might seek out advice from a repair shop instead, or maybe had a friend who had a friend whose uncle worked for Zenith or one of the other manufacturers, and would get better (we thought) advice as to what kind of care and feeding that expensive VCR needed. 33:20, difference between the tapes - Probably none, other than packaging, labeling and marketing. Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, an information source I trusted - might've been Consumer Reports magazine, but I don't recall exactly - intercepted some marketing material originally provided by a videotape manufacturer's marketing department to dealers, essentially telling the dealers how to upsell their customers higher-priced tapes. The gist of it was that there was no difference between the product lines other than the lesser-sounding and more premium-sounding names. My own experience bore this out. Back in my time-shifting days, I bought whatever VHS tapes were least expensive, although I think maybe a higher instance of tape self-destruction with cheap off-brands led me to stick with known brands, like TDK, BASF, Sony, etc. But within those brands, if there was a difference from one line of tape to the next, it wasn't showing up with the level of VCR and TV sets that I could afford. 41:25, cleaning tapes/kits worth using? - Back in the day, I did use cleaning kits on my VCRs, but I didn't buy whole starter kits. Cleaning kits typically cost under $15, and there were many kinds, some with fluid, some dry, some with moving cleaning tapes, some just with mechanisms that fooled the VCR into thinking there was a real tape in there so it would run the moving parts against the cleaning cassette parts. I generally bought the kits that used fluid, as my experience with audio tape decks led me to believe they'd do more cleaning than a dry kit, but I never claimed any expertise with this. The kits were fairly popular because, as you said, most of us didn't want to take the time and risk to open up our VCRs and clean them with cotton or foam swabs. Besides that, I, personally, wouldn't even have known what to clean, as I had no idea how a VCR tape transport mechanism worked, what would make it suddenly start eating tapes, or how to fix it if I knocked it out of alignment. A tape kit seemed the safe option.
The non-ATA flash cards were also called “linear flash”. The Apple Newton also needed them, although now there exists a third-party ATA driver you can install.
I still have a cleaning cassette, dry not wet, and it even played video while cleaning. It did a _great_ job, and when it came in handy is when you were working with old/cruddy tapes that were shedding media and stuff. The good part about the video playback was that the video playback during cleaning was basically a cleanliness test pattern. It wasn't something I needed much but when I needed it I was really glad I had it.
Cleaning cassettes were very common. The wet system ones did a much better job than the dry abrasive ones. And yes, dirty heads led to poorer recordings and more dropouts.
Happy holidays! When I lived in Ontario, I tapped some maple trees on my property and the amount you have to boil it down is mine blowing but the best syrup is that made over a wood fire. I miss real maple syrup now that I'm in Florida again.
T180 was indeed the longest VHS tape length readily available in North America allowing 9 hrs of recording in LP/SLP mode. I’ve seen a picture of a T200 VHS tape that recorded 10 hrs in LP/SLP mode but never saw one in the wild so they were uncommon. VHS cleaning tapes came in two varieties, wet and dry. The more common was the dry variety which cleaned the heads using a special cleaning tape material with no added alcohol/cleaning fluid needed and the wet version that used added alcohol/cleaning fluid. Some of the wet versions I have seen/owned included a space in the tape for the cleaning fluid bottle to be stored. Both also tended to not have a door that covered the exposed tape when not in use like you find on a normal VHS tape since that made them cheaper and getting dirt/dust on the cleaning tape material wasn’t an issue obviously. Since VHS tape heads spun unlike audio tape heads, you didn’t need to have a spool of cleaning tapa material in the wet version, just some sort of cleaning sponge. The dry version moved a length of cleaning tape past the heads to as not to collect to much dust/dirt/etc on anyone one part of the dry tape.
If I remember correct, I had E240 and E300 tapes for PAL in Europe. I didn't really like them too much, as the tape became extremely thin and fragile. The E180 and E195 tapes were the most common I think, as they often were able to fit 2 movies back when movies were roughly 90 minutes long...
There was a place nearby here in michigan that made maple syrup, conjoined with a waffle/pancake restaurant... went there regularly as a kid, sadly learned they closed some time ago when I looked into going there again for old time's sake. Oh well - I should look around for another one, hmm...
Here in Australia during the early ‘90’s you could buy a 3 tape combo pack. The combo always had 2 blank tapes, they were either 120 or 240 min, and the third tape was either a cleaning tape, or was a feature film of the time. I remember getting a pack that had the film ‘Far and Away’. These packs were usually well priced. Good times!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! F. R. Germany is Federal Republic of Germany, i.e., West Germany, although the wall fell in '89 and you showed this was made in '96, so I have no idea why that's still there. I had a Psion/Diamond personal digital assistant and before that other smaller Sharp devices similar to this.
The 1, 2, 3 was very short lived in the US. SP was the 2 hour mode (for t-120), LP was the 4 hour mode which most recorders no longer offered by the early 2000s, EP was the 6 hour mode which some manufacturers referred to as SLP.
I still have the bottle of Fader F5 when it was called "CaliLube" for over 20 years now. unless you're abusing it, it will last you. Still have the Fry's Electronics price tag on it "$7.99"
I worked in the mainframe room at a BASF office in .north London back in early 90s and we used to get products for dirt cheap. BASF video VHS tapes were rubbish. For any brand - the longer duration the tape then the thinner that tape material became and stretched easily. Being a mainframe operator we got limitless supplies of long cleaning sticks with fat heads for tape drives, plus the approved cleaning fluid for our Comparex brand IBM clone tape drives
Where I used to work we made switches for the automotive industry (think windows lights and wiper switches). Each part that can off the production line went through an electronic test, these test machines were custom built for those switches and the older ones from 1999 used industrial computers running MSDOS (version 6.1 IIRC). They didn’t have a hard drive, I think DOS was installed directly into the BIOS and the machines program was stored on a floppy disk. They worked perfectly for years until we started having random power spikes in the factory. Upon turning the machine on at just the right (or wrong) time the power spike would cause the floppy drive to destroy the floppy disk. And by destroy I mean that if you pulled back the cover and held the disk up to the light you could see where it had removed an entire track from the disk making a translucent line all the way around the disk, roughly half way between the inside and out. Those industrial computers were old tech and they appeared to all be based on 16bit ISA slots. If you’re not familiar with industrial computers the main board is just a back plain of slots and the CPU was on its own card that plugged into it. These machines then had IO boards and the floppy drive (a small laptop floppy fixed onto a board with no cable).
The Adam did the erase on power up. so something must create a bug magnetic field when the power spikes during power on. Or maybe the erase head gets activated momentarily.
ya i remember that the issue was on start up. Adding a second tape drive so you have dual tape drives was still a great upgrade. still wished we had backed up a game tape that got killed by it.
I used to have a Zarus myself. Really great little PDA it it's time. It is actually based on the GEOS operating system (like on the C-64 or NewDeal on the PC).
I spent a couple of weeks working in Germany (near Frankfurt) in the 90's . While visiting their cafeteria for lunch I asked what the sauce was that was being spooned on whatever I was going to eat. The reply was that it was "BASF", a way of describing some sort of "chemical soup" perhaps produced by BASF's big plant near Heidelberg!
PAL and NTSC tapes ran at different speeds so PAL and NTSC tapes had different lengths for the same recording time. That is probably why the tape cover specifically said it was NTSC. as a 120 minute PAL tape is shorter than a 120 minute NTSC tape. Usually PAL tapes had E numbers while NTSC had T numbers but a general consumer probably wouldn't know this so an explicit label for NTSC or PAL was a good idea. Much newer Zaurus models ran Linux or Windows CE so you can write software for them. The 5000 seems like it has a PC card slot so the memory cards for the 5000 are probably just PCMCIA memory cards.
That Video Starter System price. OUCH!!!! But that was probably in the day when a movie on VHS cost north of $75 (and yes, I bought a couple movies for nearly $100 back in the day).
from wikepedia "trichlorotriflouroethane" (CFC-113) was one of the most heavily produced CFCs. In 1989, an estimated 250,000 tons were produced. It has been used as a cleaning agent for electrical and electronic components. CFC-113’s low flammability and low toxicity made it ideal for use as a cleaner for delicate electrical equipment, fabrics, and metals. It would not harm the product it was cleaning, ignite with a spark or react with other chemicals.
Hey Adrian, these starter kits were sold with new VCR sales back in the day at a lot of Big Box electronic stores. Their sales people pushed them a lot. " Everything you need to get going and maintain your new system". I suspect these were high profit and commission items used to support sales.
I used to have a wet head cleaner for my VCR that had a chamois strip. Seemed to work OK at the time and certainly never did any harm as the VCR was still working great when I gave it to a mates parents many years later
E180 3 hour cassettes were common here in Europe, and I still have several of them. I also have E240 4 hour cassettes. And I have a few BASF E300, which are 5 hour cassettes in SP mode, though these were rare, and as far as I know only BASF made them. You could have 15 hours in extended play mode on a single cassette.
Head-cleaning tapes are useful if you're watching a tape that happens to have a bit that's shedding, as indicated by white noise appearing on the screen. In my experience it only lasts a few seconds, but the shed material can linger on the head, causing the noise to remain as well. It's way faster to pop the tape out, pop in the cleaning tape for a few seconds, then swap back than to unplug the VCR, drag it to the workbench, open it up, strip it down to where the heads are visible (probably a more complicated process for top loaders), and repeat the process in reverse.
I remember this stuff from back before 2000 that was amazing stuff. but you couldn't get it on any plastic. Boy do i miss that stuff. My brother in law used to get industrial cans with a white label from his job and gave them to me. man that stuff was truly amazing on contacts. And i worked for a company that made brushless electric motors and controllers for them. we had a large white tank strapped to a pallet with the same stuff in it. We used it there to remove solder flux. but nobody would ever tell me what it was. and there was no label. They called it solvent. That's it, pretty general. I remember it would cut through ANY grease or oils and take any corrosion out like a light. And it wasn't flammable either. It evaporated and smelled similar to ether. You don't have to wipe it off like the new stuff.
When I was in 2nd grade, we went to a local farm for a field trip that made maple syrup. I remember tasting the syrup at different stages in its manufacturing process. Our treat was a small bag of maple candy made at the farm.
I've got a catalog here from 1980. A single E180 (=T120) would set you back by 42 Deutschmarks which is around a hundred bucks today. I have many of those old mid-1980s BASF cassettes and they're still watchable (if your definition of watchable covers VHS quality - mine does. I even still use CRT TVs to watch movies.). So the guarantee claim is valid. Btw. there IS tape that is unsuitable for stereo. I've got two SKC cassettes from the mid- to late 80s that just won't take a linear stereo track. Video quality is OK though. I've got some really old linear stereo VHS recorders that could show the strength of the linear stereo track from the tape. And yes - on those mid 80s BASF, it peaks at +0db (on the SKC, there was barely any indication of a stereo soundtrack after recording it on the same machine). But then again, these two cassettes are the only out of my >700 VHS tapes I encountered that would not work with stereo. 14.4k Baud was used for Fax IIRC. And Fax was still huge in the 90s. And then the internet came and everyone except Germany got rid of their fax machines.
Countries that need to put Democratic or People's in the name are dictatorships: Democratic Republic of Germany, People's Republic of China, People's Republic of Korea and my favorite Democratic People's Republic of Algeria. There is even an article in Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_republic
As for the floppy drive “leave the disk in the drive” problem, well, the R/W head IS an inductor. If - for some reason - there was a DC bias on it when power was removed, and the head was pressed up against a disk, the magnetic field would collapse. This might flip a bit here or there. 😮 Now, granted, I can’t think of a good reason why there’d be a DC bias on the coil, but maybe one end is tied to ground and the other end has a leaky electrolytic cap on the +5v rail? 🤔
Back in the day (pre 90s) TTE or Trichlortrifloroethane was a common degreaser. I used it a lot. It was incredible for cleaning electrical parts, tape heads, capstans etc. It is a form of freon that is liquid at room temp. It has a high vapour pressure which means it needs to be stored in a very air tight container. Hence why yours is gone. I actually have about 150mL left from a can I bought in the late 80s. It was made illegal because it contributes to ozone depleatiopn in the atmosphere. its actually very inert which made it an excellent electronics cleaner. There were also variants that were a mix of TTE and IPA which were also effective.
I love that Sharp! I had a Psion 5 in a similar format, but that also had a programming language, kind of a basic with specific functions for that device. I used it to write a Flashcard system to help me with my German and Latin vocabulary, although the Latin version had "sort of" spreadsheet facilities to generate conjugations ... Yes, Latin is a language that you can learn with a spreadsheet! Fond memories!
Something I recently discovered is stereo VHS tapes are backwards compatible with mono and it's two completely separate tracks. So you can have two completely different tracks, one in stereo and one in mono. I digitized a tape and only had access to a mono VCR and the audio was recorded over with a different track. Some weird weather station recording. Luckily I was able to get a stereo VCR and the track was correct on that. So basically you can grab any stereo VHS tape and record a secret mono track on it while not destroying the original stereo track.
I have a couple of Recoton cleaning products, a VHS tape, (and later) a CD cleaning disk. I didn't pay a lot for them back then, and almost choked when I saw the price on the box! I had a couple of very high quality VHS players, and would run the cleaning tape once every couple of months. They got heavy use, (recording and playing kiddie shows and movies) and just got retired when the technology changed. I am also a De-Oxit fan, and also felt I was wasting more spray De-Oxit than I was using. So I did what you do with it , and sprayed it into a dripper bottle. I love the stuff! I am going upstairs, to have something with maple syrup on it. Merry Christmas
Lovely video with extra insight on maple-sirup and all those things I don't know about. About the VCR-tapes and also cleaning-tape... well, I do have them and remember the days that we had to pay over 30 Guilders for one single tape which was about the same in $ when I remember right.But those could be taped over and over and over again and again while cheaper tapes from later you had to cut short because they started giving problems mostly at the ends of the tapes.
Dichlorofluoroethane is a solvent specifically used for precision electronics because it doesn't react with anything that you don't want it to react with. It isn't crazy toxic, though you still shouldn't breathe the fumes. The bigger issue is that it's a CFC so it's not good for the ozone layer.
In storage I have a TDK T240 VHS tape; that I would only use in my AKAI VS1EK machine as it was clever enough to not over stress the thin tape and snap it .
I was told in my school's IT lessons not to leave disks in drives when you power on or off. We were told that the head would hit the disk. This was told to us by the same teacher who said the a 64 bit computer would be impossible because it would take too long for it to access all it's memory locations. Of course at the time CPU's ran at around 1MHz. Here I am using a computer with a 64Bit CPU to watch this video.
Here in Rochester, NY the temperatures.for the last week or so have been jumping between the high single digits to the low 30's. The first time in a long time we had a white Christmas.
Thank you for getting me interested in VHS again! Without you, all of my old tapes would just sit and degrade. If my sister's reading this, I want that tape called "How To Holiday In Ilfracombe" please - so I can digitise it and preserve it. It's got childish antics from the early 80s and features a rustic country manor (haunted, of course), some cream teas, Devonian pub life and my mother (R.I.P.) cooking something. The camerawork is quite amateurish, since cameras were heavy and I was a child.
I had a later Zaurus, circa 2003. SL 5500 maybe? With a portrait-oriented color screen, ran Linux and had a great hardware keyboard. That thing was pretty cool and I plugged in early Wi-Fi CF card into it for college.
Actually, the one in the video reminds me more of my Diamond Mako that I had maybe around 2000. A rebadged Psion Revo, it was clamshell and monochrome and quite a bit smaller, but I got a lot of use out of that thing too. Ahh, memories 🙂
I recall this Video Starter System box design and cleaning tape. I'm guessing my family would have purchased it when we got our first VCR circa 84-85, so that will date the product. I recall our cover being a gray vinyl.
Re snow in NY: We've had a white Christmas here in Niagara Falls, NY, though it did get just above freezing yesterday. It wasn't enough to melt the snow on the ground.
That Sharp sure seems capable for a Z80-based system. But the modem name seems like a nod to 65C02. BASF grew a lot in stock price, people who had stocks back in the early 80s would see Apple-like level or valuation now. I remember hearing and reading about the freon stuff (cleaning liquid) how it was the "good stuff" and most professionals used it. Some technicians still hoard the stuff as apparently it's a lot more potent than IPA without damaging anything, apart from ozone.
Re: the Sharp Zarus. I was convinced in those days that I needed to have a organizer. I was just certain it was going to solve all my organization issues. I eventually had a Palm and then a Sony Clie. The Clie had a mp3 player built in. Anyway, I'm still not organized...
Ohhh... The Adam tape drives reminded me. If you feel like it, the stringy floppy was a thing. It used a tape mechanism, but worked like a floppy. Much faster than a standard cassette drive, but not as fast as an actual floppy drive, as it was essentially a serial tape drive. But it would seek, had a table of contents, etc. Would be worth a review if you feel like it. Kind of like how Zip drives were a thing, then died a sudden death. The stringy floppy was only around for a short time, IIRC.
26:16 Huh. Everything in this box, including the cleaning fluid, but minus the cleaning tape, was kicking around the livingroom when I was growing up. My parents were cheap, so there's no way they spent nearly $70 on this kit. Best I can figure is that maybe this kit (or parts of it) got thrown in as a freebie when they purchased their VCR?
The VHS cleaning tapes are from a time where companies in europe/germany tried to use stickers to void warranty for PCs when opened. This made cleaning new VHS recorders a bad idea and for movie nights a quick clean with tape was easier
27:25 - a T-120 is similar to an E-180 in length. I found a FUJI E-180 and that claims to be 258m (846 feet) - so it's just slightly longer than the BASF T-120 at 246m. I've also found a BASF E-240 that states it's length as 343m (1125 feet) so that's probably much closer to a T-160. Somewhere I've got a T-180 made by BASF, not sure but I think that thinner tape must be similar to the E-300 (5 hours in PAL-SP) which are rare and were only made by a few manufacturers including BASF. BASF also made T-130/E-195 length tapes and I'm assuming these are the equivalents in NTSC/PAL because BASF uses yellow packaging for both versions.
Whoa, I wasn't aware that all VHS cassettes were chrome - there was I in 1984 (10 years old) paying top dollar for TDK's Super Avilyn E180 cassettes thinking they were something special...
They were all chrome, but the quality did vary-and the HG tapes were better, as a general rule...for example TDK EHG WAS better than the cheaper version-the difference was most noticeable on the longest-play mode(SLP/EP), but you could see the difference at all speeds.
You missed the “More” button on the bottom left which is likely where the paint program along with other programs that lack a direct shortcut on the left/right panels.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year Adrian! On the Sharp palmtop - are there more programs in the "More" button on the bottom left of the screen maybe?
The longest VHS tapes I recall were 300 - or five hour tapes. They were pretty expensive and since they seemingly used a thinner carrier material, it came with a warning on the early versions that it might cause tape salad... but 240 ones were the main go to format around here. Four hour recordings. But I only remember "LP" mode to double the length - also, yes, BASF is a German chemical company, so having German on the cover was a natural :D
Those VHS tapes were the more common E-240 and the rare/expensive E-300 for the PAL/SECAM market. There weren't any T-300 and afaik also no widespread T-240 VHS tapes made for the NTSC market. While the cassettes were essentially the same, the tape speed was different for NTSC and PAL, so an E-240 tape could only hold 173 minutes of video if used in a NTSC recorder, while a T-180 tape could hold 253 minutes of video if used in a PAL recorder. That's also why LP was more often used in NTSC countries while it was rarely used in Europe (and EP/SLP to triple the recording time wasn't even a thing at all).
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
These videos are "Mini" in the same way that luggables are ultraportable laptops! 😜
It's "mini" like a "minicomputer"!
Nominating for best comment of 2024
At this point, just call it the Super MailCall.
It's super midweek mail call now 😂
You should have seen the old Vacuum Tube Mail Calls. They were 100x larger and way less efficient!
Scrapbook! It even has a scribbly thing on the "icon"...
Retailers would often use these starter kits as a marketing ploy. The wholesale price was very low and they would offer them for free when you bought a VCR, claiming that they were giving you $67.95 in free accessories even though nobody would have ever paid that much in reality.
Or sell it at a "deep discount" for $30, kind of like the $40 Best Buy HDMI cables. :)
Recoton though, absolutely remember that name from back then, they had all kinds of sketchy-looking A/V accessories.
That makes total sense. Like those infomercials on TV now. "Get this free, a $99 value!" Uhh right....
As a kid in the 80s I remember VHS stuff being prohibitively expensive back then. I think early blank VHS cassettes were $10-15 EACH in 80's money, so as a kids we were always trying to get our hands on cheap tapes by scrounging those instructional VHS tapes nobody kept or wanted and then using the scotch-tape over the hole trick to record over them. A lot of people these days don't remember or were too young to know how insanely expensive video equipment was when it first came out. I wasn't able to afford a used camcorder until the mid 90s, and when we were kids in the 80s it was still common to use 8mm and super 8 film camera because even though film was expensive, camcorders cost more than good used cars.
New blank tapes were like gold... there was nothing more agonizing than looking for something you had recorded, only to discover someone had taped over it because you were out of blanks. One year my dad used up all of our tapes to record the entire America's Cup sailboat race and erased all manner of things.
as a kid*
VHS was different in Europe and the UK. We only had two speeds to record at, not three, SP and LP which doubled the time and halved the quality, but then again we had the PAL system with more lines to record. Tapes could be bought at pretty much any length from half an hour upwards at half hour increments, but the most common were E120, E180, and E240 minute tapes. Sometimes companies did 'buy three hour tapes and get half an hour free' promotions and I had a couple of E210s. At one point they thinned down the tape so much that they started cramming 5 hour tapes into a shell, E300s, but most manufacturers would state that 4 hour tapes were the max for their machines. But imagine 10 hours of LP content on an E300 tape!
When we first got a player, pretty late in '87, single tapes were still around £5 each, and for the first year I nursed three tapes through multiple recordings. But pretty soon the price for blank tapes plummeted, and we'd get multipacks, 4 for £10 and so forth. We'd usually get Scotch (re-record not fade away) because of their lifetime guarantee. I made use of that a few times to get replacement tapes when they'd get creased. Had a couple hundred blank tapes for timeshifting at one point, down to just a handful of home movies now. All meticulously backed up to DVD-R, but that's another story.
Yep, we never had enough tapes in my household. Always recorded at the slowest speed to get more on the tape.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking about. I remember movies being $79 and higher. The VCRs were crazy expensive then also.
I did have a 14.4K modem at one point. I bought it in '92 when my roommate graduated, and took his 9.6K with him. It seemed awesomely fast at the time!
yea I had one as well that didnt support compression
I suspect that you would use the "Scrapbook" application if you wanted to make pictures, it seems pretty unlikely that Sharp would make the paint tools only for making a personalized startup picture.
I would also assume that you could insert drawings into documents in the wordprocessor application.
Triclorotrifluoroethane was one of those pesky chemicals we used to use in refrigeration that depleted the ozone layer. It was also used as a mild cleaning solvent for metals and plastics and even as a dry cleaning solvent. Versatile but very bad stuff like most fluorocarbons I suppose.
yep...
I worked at hollywood video and I spliced tapes all the time. They were damaged and wouldn't play. We'd just cut the damaged section off and had a special splicing kit. We even had leader only casettes. It's maybe 1 meter of leader. No magnetic tape. I had one that was completely crushed. I replaced both reels and the shell. The only down side to splicing is you get a glitch where the splice happens. But you barely notice it. We played them back in our own VCR. No issues. No customers ever complained.
Agreed-no problem with splicing video tape, provided it is done correctly.
@@m.k.8158 with the kit we had it made a perfect splice every time. No overlapping of the tape. It actually locks down the tape before you make the cut.
@@awilliams1701 Yeah I bet they were worried about people splicing tapes using scotch tape like you used to do with audio tape. I could see that peeling off and getting on the video drum...
@@adriansdigitalbasement2 As long as you're really careful with it, it should be fine. But if you're not any kind of tape is going to go badly.
BASF VHS tapes, dates well when black package (HG) says "Germany" and one with silver package says "W. Germany". So silver package is pre-1990 and black is post-1990.
Considering the 1984 date on the box, though, it's debatable that they weren't just being nonspecific, like how stuff that's "Made in Korea" isn't actually from before the Korean War (or after some hypothetical future reunification).
I had a Casio BOSS diary back in 96-97. I've even made an interface to connect to PC and transfer data. It was very useful for my job back then. Tasks and reminders mostly. I still have a couple of Sharp / Casio smaller digital diaries around in my collection.
Hi Adrian, have you ever considered putting chapter markers in longer videos where you cover numerous different subjects in a single video? It would make it easier for people to jump to parts of the video that interest them most. Thanks.
2:53 the thing that blows my mind about weather in Portland is that you can start out by driving in rain in SE (Milwalkie, Moreland, Sellwood), get out past 185th, get the car covered in snow out there, and drive back to SE to discover that it never stopped raining. But meanwhile, you head _west_ to the hills out past Banks or McMinnville and its icy winter conditions.
I loved the hushed, research grade "ah, so we have multiple farts, now."
🤣
Crazy Price!!!! HAS TO BE CRAZY EDDIE'S!!! A New York, New Jersey, Connecticut tri-state area ICON from the 80's and 90's!!!
Yep. It even matches their corporate color scheme.
It has that Crazy Eddie's "Such a deal!" vibes
Merry Christmas, Adrian! You're never too old to learn, and I've learned quite a few things from you this year. Thank you for making 2024 fun, and here's to future videos in 2025 🥳
I can confirm the HP 100LX and 200LX are DOS based, specifically MS-DOS 5.0. They use a SoC based on the 80186 at around 7.9 MHz with 640k of conventional RAM. The really cool thing is they have 640x200 displays and a single PC Card slot that supports SRAM, Flash Memory, and modem cards. My own 200LX has a 32MB card and I've got it connected to a Serial to Wifi adapter to get it online. It even runs Planet X3!
Merry Christmas, Adrian and other viewers! 🎄
It's hard to believe, but I found ADB in December 2019, so I'm watching this channel for 5 years now!
Thank you for all this countless hours!
The Deox-IT Fader Lube doesn't break down the carbon tracks in pots. That's why it's important to use that instead of the regular Deox-IT.
That makes sense, since a usual thing you'd _want_ it to break down _is_ carbon build up from arcing contacts and things, so that differentiation is probably important.
I bought a can of contact cleaner for the express purpose of working on some dimmer switches, and now I'm not so sure that I should.
@@moosemaimer If it's a potentiometer you should probably use the fader lube Deox-IT. If it's a rheostat any contact cleaner will work. It's easy enough to do a Google Image Search to see what the different control parts look like.
I think D5 and F5 are the same except F5 has more and different oil. I haven't had either one dissolving parts, F just feels better for faders. According to the manufacturer: "Using the DeoxIT D5 on the rotary pots is fine. DeoxIT Fader is mostly used on linear faders"
Happy Christmas and new year Adrian. I love super mini mail calls and of course your repair videos.
17:00, maple syrup, sugar, treats - I grew up in upstate NY, and my town had a maple syrup/sugar operation in it called Ye Old Sugar House. It was pretty much as you described, with the metal taps in the trees, collection buckets hanging beneath, and workers emptying the buckets into some sort of mobile collector (maybe in wheelbarrows or some sort of cart or even a small tractor, because the place was located in the center of many square miles of forest full of maple trees, so carrying one bucket at a time would've been quite a lot of work, not to mention the problem of trying not to spill any), and pouring it into a large, elevated tank. The tank had a movable trough that would send sap on demand to the boiler where the maple syrup and sugar were made. Like where you grew up, Ye Olde Sugar House was open to tourists and school trips, and I remember going several times. At the end, they would give us a small cup (probably something like a 3oz bathroom cup) that was maybe 1/4 full of maple syrup for us to taste. As a kid, I found the concentration of the syrup overwhelming. As I got older, though, I came to love real maple syrup on pancakes, waffles and in things. It took me longer to acquire a taste for maple sugar, but eventually I did. Since it was locally produced, we always had a container of real maple syrup in the house when I was growing up, and I still keep a bottle of it in the house. Like you, I find artificial maple-flavored syrups to be no substitute for the real thing. In fact, I won't even use them -- to me they're just gross.
26:15, video starter system - In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Recoton was a company known for a lot of audio and video tape accessories, including storage units, cleaning kits and even blank cassettes. I wouldn't be surprised if someone, somewhere actually paid $67.95 for that kit. Until the mid to late 1980s, VCRs were still a fairly new product. A lot of people were still using their first. They had paid a lot of money for those first VCRs, and had no idea how to maintain them. There was also no Internet yet, so not a lot of places to turn for good information about such things. Your best source of maintenance information was usually the dealer where you bought your VCR, and that dealer probably had shelves full of various cleaning and maintenance kits, so they hardly had an incentive to tell you, "Oh, no, you don't need this...". People who didn't know better would just pull out the wallet and buy whatever was there at whatever the cost. People who took the trouble to try to learn about the technology might seek out advice from a repair shop instead, or maybe had a friend who had a friend whose uncle worked for Zenith or one of the other manufacturers, and would get better (we thought) advice as to what kind of care and feeding that expensive VCR needed.
33:20, difference between the tapes - Probably none, other than packaging, labeling and marketing. Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, an information source I trusted - might've been Consumer Reports magazine, but I don't recall exactly - intercepted some marketing material originally provided by a videotape manufacturer's marketing department to dealers, essentially telling the dealers how to upsell their customers higher-priced tapes. The gist of it was that there was no difference between the product lines other than the lesser-sounding and more premium-sounding names. My own experience bore this out. Back in my time-shifting days, I bought whatever VHS tapes were least expensive, although I think maybe a higher instance of tape self-destruction with cheap off-brands led me to stick with known brands, like TDK, BASF, Sony, etc. But within those brands, if there was a difference from one line of tape to the next, it wasn't showing up with the level of VCR and TV sets that I could afford.
41:25, cleaning tapes/kits worth using? - Back in the day, I did use cleaning kits on my VCRs, but I didn't buy whole starter kits. Cleaning kits typically cost under $15, and there were many kinds, some with fluid, some dry, some with moving cleaning tapes, some just with mechanisms that fooled the VCR into thinking there was a real tape in there so it would run the moving parts against the cleaning cassette parts. I generally bought the kits that used fluid, as my experience with audio tape decks led me to believe they'd do more cleaning than a dry kit, but I never claimed any expertise with this. The kits were fairly popular because, as you said, most of us didn't want to take the time and risk to open up our VCRs and clean them with cotton or foam swabs. Besides that, I, personally, wouldn't even have known what to clean, as I had no idea how a VCR tape transport mechanism worked, what would make it suddenly start eating tapes, or how to fix it if I knocked it out of alignment. A tape kit seemed the safe option.
Alright, another "after dark" edition, I love these!! Happy holidays Adrian and all viewers reading this!
The non-ATA flash cards were also called “linear flash”. The Apple Newton also needed them, although now there exists a third-party ATA driver you can install.
I still have a cleaning cassette, dry not wet, and it even played video while cleaning. It did a _great_ job, and when it came in handy is when you were working with old/cruddy tapes that were shedding media and stuff. The good part about the video playback was that the video playback during cleaning was basically a cleanliness test pattern. It wasn't something I needed much but when I needed it I was really glad I had it.
Cleaning cassettes were very common. The wet system ones did a much better job than the dry abrasive ones. And yes, dirty heads led to poorer recordings and more dropouts.
Happy holidays! When I lived in Ontario, I tapped some maple trees on my property and the amount you have to boil it down is mine blowing but the best syrup is that made over a wood fire. I miss real maple syrup now that I'm in Florida again.
Adrian, channeling Clint, channeling Duke Nukem…! Love it!
T180 was indeed the longest VHS tape length readily available in North America allowing 9 hrs of recording in LP/SLP mode. I’ve seen a picture of a T200 VHS tape that recorded 10 hrs in LP/SLP mode but never saw one in the wild so they were uncommon.
VHS cleaning tapes came in two varieties, wet and dry. The more common was the dry variety which cleaned the heads using a special cleaning tape material with no added alcohol/cleaning fluid needed and the wet version that used added alcohol/cleaning fluid. Some of the wet versions I have seen/owned included a space in the tape for the cleaning fluid bottle to be stored. Both also tended to not have a door that covered the exposed tape when not in use like you find on a normal VHS tape since that made them cheaper and getting dirt/dust on the cleaning tape material wasn’t an issue obviously.
Since VHS tape heads spun unlike audio tape heads, you didn’t need to have a spool of cleaning tapa material in the wet version, just some sort of cleaning sponge. The dry version moved a length of cleaning tape past the heads to as not to collect to much dust/dirt/etc on anyone one part of the dry tape.
If I remember correct, I had E240 and E300 tapes for PAL in Europe. I didn't really like them too much, as the tape became extremely thin and fragile. The E180 and E195 tapes were the most common I think, as they often were able to fit 2 movies back when movies were roughly 90 minutes long...
L.I.C., NY = Long Island City
There was a place nearby here in michigan that made maple syrup, conjoined with a waffle/pancake restaurant... went there regularly as a kid, sadly learned they closed some time ago when I looked into going there again for old time's sake. Oh well - I should look around for another one, hmm...
I like how the chrome tape box specifies it's printed in _West_ Germany. That's a sure sign of the times when it was made.
Here in Australia during the early ‘90’s you could buy a 3 tape combo pack. The combo always had 2 blank tapes, they were either 120 or 240 min, and the third tape was either a cleaning tape, or was a feature film of the time. I remember getting a pack that had the film ‘Far and Away’. These packs were usually well priced. Good times!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! F. R. Germany is Federal Republic of Germany, i.e., West Germany, although the wall fell in '89 and you showed this was made in '96, so I have no idea why that's still there. I had a Psion/Diamond personal digital assistant and before that other smaller Sharp devices similar to this.
The 1, 2, 3 was very short lived in the US. SP was the 2 hour mode (for t-120), LP was the 4 hour mode which most recorders no longer offered by the early 2000s, EP was the 6 hour mode which some manufacturers referred to as SLP.
I still have the bottle of Fader F5 when it was called "CaliLube" for over 20 years now. unless you're abusing it, it will last you.
Still have the Fry's Electronics price tag on it "$7.99"
I worked in the mainframe room at a BASF office in .north London back in early 90s and we used to get products for dirt cheap. BASF video VHS tapes were rubbish. For any brand - the longer duration the tape then the thinner that tape material became and stretched easily. Being a mainframe operator we got limitless supplies of long cleaning sticks with fat heads for tape drives, plus the approved cleaning fluid for our Comparex brand IBM clone tape drives
Where I used to work we made switches for the automotive industry (think windows lights and wiper switches). Each part that can off the production line went through an electronic test, these test machines were custom built for those switches and the older ones from 1999 used industrial computers running MSDOS (version 6.1 IIRC). They didn’t have a hard drive, I think DOS was installed directly into the BIOS and the machines program was stored on a floppy disk. They worked perfectly for years until we started having random power spikes in the factory. Upon turning the machine on at just the right (or wrong) time the power spike would cause the floppy drive to destroy the floppy disk. And by destroy I mean that if you pulled back the cover and held the disk up to the light you could see where it had removed an entire track from the disk making a translucent line all the way around the disk, roughly half way between the inside and out. Those industrial computers were old tech and they appeared to all be based on 16bit ISA slots. If you’re not familiar with industrial computers the main board is just a back plain of slots and the CPU was on its own card that plugged into it. These machines then had IO boards and the floppy drive (a small laptop floppy fixed onto a board with no cable).
The Adam did the erase on power up. so something must create a bug magnetic field when the power spikes during power on. Or maybe the erase head gets activated momentarily.
ya i remember that the issue was on start up. Adding a second tape drive so you have dual tape drives was still a great upgrade. still wished we had backed up a game tape that got killed by it.
I used to have a Zarus myself. Really great little PDA it it's time. It is actually based on the GEOS operating system (like on the C-64 or NewDeal on the PC).
I spent a couple of weeks working in Germany (near Frankfurt) in the 90's . While visiting their cafeteria for lunch I asked what the sauce was that was being spooned on whatever I was going to eat. The reply was that it was "BASF", a way of describing some sort of "chemical soup" perhaps produced by BASF's big plant near Heidelberg!
That casette cleaning solution is more commonly known as Freon 113 / CFC-113
Yeeeeep, and it is IMMENSELY damaging to the ozone layer. Really great for cleaning electronics though.
IIRC it also used to be the base solvent for correcting fluid (Tipp-Ex) and it's removal fluid.
I believe that this was also called Freon TF.
Happy Holidays Adrian. I really enjoy your videos. Still have my C64 and a couple of ZX81's
PAL and NTSC tapes ran at different speeds so PAL and NTSC tapes had different lengths for the same recording time. That is probably why the tape cover specifically said it was NTSC. as a 120 minute PAL tape is shorter than a 120 minute NTSC tape. Usually PAL tapes had E numbers while NTSC had T numbers but a general consumer probably wouldn't know this so an explicit label for NTSC or PAL was a good idea.
Much newer Zaurus models ran Linux or Windows CE so you can write software for them. The 5000 seems like it has a PC card slot so the memory cards for the 5000 are probably just PCMCIA memory cards.
That Video Starter System price. OUCH!!!! But that was probably in the day when a movie on VHS cost north of $75 (and yes, I bought a couple movies for nearly $100 back in the day).
from wikepedia "trichlorotriflouroethane" (CFC-113) was one of the most heavily produced CFCs. In 1989, an estimated 250,000 tons were produced. It has been used as a cleaning agent for electrical and electronic components. CFC-113’s low flammability and low toxicity made it ideal for use as a cleaner for delicate electrical equipment, fabrics, and metals. It would not harm the product it was cleaning, ignite with a spark or react with other chemicals.
Hey Adrian, these starter kits were sold with new VCR sales back in the day at a lot of Big Box electronic stores. Their sales people pushed them a lot. " Everything you need to get going and maintain your new system". I suspect these were high profit and commission items used to support sales.
I'm glad that the package made it to you safely! I'm hoping that big package is a Coleco Adam!
I used to have a wet head cleaner for my VCR that had a chamois strip. Seemed to work OK at the time and certainly never did any harm as the VCR was still working great when I gave it to a mates parents many years later
E180 3 hour cassettes were common here in Europe, and I still have several of them. I also have E240 4 hour cassettes. And I have a few BASF E300, which are 5 hour cassettes in SP mode, though these were rare, and as far as I know only BASF made them. You could have 15 hours in extended play mode on a single cassette.
Head-cleaning tapes are useful if you're watching a tape that happens to have a bit that's shedding, as indicated by white noise appearing on the screen. In my experience it only lasts a few seconds, but the shed material can linger on the head, causing the noise to remain as well. It's way faster to pop the tape out, pop in the cleaning tape for a few seconds, then swap back than to unplug the VCR, drag it to the workbench, open it up, strip it down to where the heads are visible (probably a more complicated process for top loaders), and repeat the process in reverse.
I remember this stuff from back before 2000 that was amazing stuff. but you couldn't get it on any plastic. Boy do i miss that stuff. My brother in law used to get industrial cans with a white label from his job and gave them to me. man that stuff was truly amazing on contacts. And i worked for a company that made brushless electric motors and controllers for them. we had a large white tank strapped to a pallet with the same stuff in it. We used it there to remove solder flux. but nobody would ever tell me what it was. and there was no label. They called it solvent. That's it, pretty general. I remember it would cut through ANY grease or oils and take any corrosion out like a light. And it wasn't flammable either. It evaporated and smelled similar to ether. You don't have to wipe it off like the new stuff.
When I was in 2nd grade, we went to a local farm for a field trip that made maple syrup. I remember tasting the syrup at different stages in its manufacturing process. Our treat was a small bag of maple candy made at the farm.
Trichlorotrifluoroethane (TCTFE)(From the head cleaner bottle) is known as Freon 113 and was banned in 2000
Enjoyable, as always. Happy New Year!🎉
Merry Christmas Adrian, Looking forward to another year!
I've got a catalog here from 1980. A single E180 (=T120) would set you back by 42 Deutschmarks which is around a hundred bucks today.
I have many of those old mid-1980s BASF cassettes and they're still watchable (if your definition of watchable covers VHS quality - mine does. I even still use CRT TVs to watch movies.). So the guarantee claim is valid.
Btw. there IS tape that is unsuitable for stereo. I've got two SKC cassettes from the mid- to late 80s that just won't take a linear stereo track. Video quality is OK though. I've got some really old linear stereo VHS recorders that could show the strength of the linear stereo track from the tape. And yes - on those mid 80s BASF, it peaks at +0db (on the SKC, there was barely any indication of a stereo soundtrack after recording it on the same machine). But then again, these two cassettes are the only out of my >700 VHS tapes I encountered that would not work with stereo.
14.4k Baud was used for Fax IIRC. And Fax was still huge in the 90s. And then the internet came and everyone except Germany got rid of their fax machines.
1:06:54 I was wondering if there was any kind of games for this. I also wonder if new programs could be made to an old device like this
In a way, everything sent to Adrian is perishable. Certainly retro tech perishes all on its own.
Germany, F. R. stands for "Federal Republic". As opposed to the "Democratic Republic". The federal republic was in fact the democratic one.
Rule of thumb: any country with Democratic in its name isn’t.
Countries that need to put Democratic or People's in the name are dictatorships: Democratic Republic of Germany, People's Republic of China, People's Republic of Korea and my favorite Democratic People's Republic of Algeria. There is even an article in Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_republic
Merry Christmas, Adrian!
Merry Christmas Adrian! Wish you and your family a great holiday and awesome New Year.
As for the floppy drive “leave the disk in the drive” problem, well, the R/W head IS an inductor. If - for some reason - there was a DC bias on it when power was removed, and the head was pressed up against a disk, the magnetic field would collapse. This might flip a bit here or there. 😮 Now, granted, I can’t think of a good reason why there’d be a DC bias on the coil, but maybe one end is tied to ground and the other end has a leaky electrolytic cap on the +5v rail? 🤔
Back in the day (pre 90s) TTE or Trichlortrifloroethane was a common degreaser. I used it a lot. It was incredible for cleaning electrical parts, tape heads, capstans etc. It is a form of freon that is liquid at room temp. It has a high vapour pressure which means it needs to be stored in a very air tight container. Hence why yours is gone. I actually have about 150mL left from a can I bought in the late 80s. It was made illegal because it contributes to ozone depleatiopn in the atmosphere. its actually very inert which made it an excellent electronics cleaner. There were also variants that were a mix of TTE and IPA which were also effective.
I believe that this was also called Freon TF.
@ Yes thats sounds familiar.
I love that Sharp! I had a Psion 5 in a similar format, but that also had a programming language, kind of a basic with specific functions for that device. I used it to write a Flashcard system to help me with my German and Latin vocabulary, although the Latin version had "sort of" spreadsheet facilities to generate conjugations ... Yes, Latin is a language that you can learn with a spreadsheet!
Fond memories!
As always, thanks for the content Adrian!
Something I recently discovered is stereo VHS tapes are backwards compatible with mono and it's two completely separate tracks. So you can have two completely different tracks, one in stereo and one in mono. I digitized a tape and only had access to a mono VCR and the audio was recorded over with a different track. Some weird weather station recording. Luckily I was able to get a stereo VCR and the track was correct on that. So basically you can grab any stereo VHS tape and record a secret mono track on it while not destroying the original stereo track.
I have a couple of Recoton cleaning products, a VHS tape, (and later) a CD cleaning disk. I didn't pay a lot for them back then, and almost choked when I saw the price on the box! I had a couple of very high quality VHS players, and would run the cleaning tape once every couple of months. They got heavy use, (recording and playing kiddie shows and movies) and just got retired when the technology changed.
I am also a De-Oxit fan, and also felt I was wasting more spray De-Oxit than I was using. So I did what you do with it , and sprayed it into a dripper bottle. I love the stuff!
I am going upstairs, to have something with maple syrup on it.
Merry Christmas
Likely it was an upsell item with your new VCR. Fascinating look at history. Thanks!
Lovely video with extra insight on maple-sirup and all those things I don't know about.
About the VCR-tapes and also cleaning-tape... well, I do have them and remember the days that we had to pay over 30 Guilders for one single tape which was about the same in $ when I remember right.But those could be taped over and over and over again and again while cheaper tapes from later you had to cut short because they started giving problems mostly at the ends of the tapes.
I love the cozy feeling with the after-dark coloured lights. I feel like I've opened a Christmas present early! 😄
It's almost even kinda halloweeny. :)
Dichlorofluoroethane is a solvent specifically used for precision electronics because it doesn't react with anything that you don't want it to react with. It isn't crazy toxic, though you still shouldn't breathe the fumes. The bigger issue is that it's a CFC so it's not good for the ozone layer.
In storage I have a TDK T240 VHS tape; that I would only use in my AKAI VS1EK machine as it was clever enough to not over stress the thin tape and snap it .
I was told in my school's IT lessons not to leave disks in drives when you power on or off. We were told that the head would hit the disk. This was told to us by the same teacher who said the a 64 bit computer would be impossible because it would take too long for it to access all it's memory locations. Of course at the time CPU's ran at around 1MHz. Here I am using a computer with a 64Bit CPU to watch this video.
you are so right about the latitude of Portland and Montreal, yesterday Christmas day, it was -18C here .
Here in Rochester, NY the temperatures.for the last week or so have been jumping between the high single digits to the low 30's. The first time in a long time we had a white Christmas.
Thank you for getting me interested in VHS again! Without you, all of my old tapes would just sit and degrade. If my sister's reading this, I want that tape called "How To Holiday In Ilfracombe" please - so I can digitise it and preserve it. It's got childish antics from the early 80s and features a rustic country manor (haunted, of course), some cream teas, Devonian pub life and my mother (R.I.P.) cooking something. The camerawork is quite amateurish, since cameras were heavy and I was a child.
I had a later Zaurus, circa 2003. SL 5500 maybe? With a portrait-oriented color screen, ran Linux and had a great hardware keyboard. That thing was pretty cool and I plugged in early Wi-Fi CF card into it for college.
Actually, the one in the video reminds me more of my Diamond Mako that I had maybe around 2000. A rebadged Psion Revo, it was clamshell and monochrome and quite a bit smaller, but I got a lot of use out of that thing too. Ahh, memories 🙂
I recall this Video Starter System box design and cleaning tape. I'm guessing my family would have purchased it when we got our first VCR circa 84-85, so that will date the product. I recall our cover being a gray vinyl.
Re snow in NY: We've had a white Christmas here in Niagara Falls, NY, though it did get just above freezing yesterday. It wasn't enough to melt the snow on the ground.
That Sharp sure seems capable for a Z80-based system. But the modem name seems like a nod to 65C02.
BASF grew a lot in stock price, people who had stocks back in the early 80s would see Apple-like level or valuation now.
I remember hearing and reading about the freon stuff (cleaning liquid) how it was the "good stuff" and most professionals used it. Some technicians still hoard the stuff as apparently it's a lot more potent than IPA without damaging anything, apart from ozone.
that video tape cleaning chemical is not really toxic, its just bad for the environment because its a CFC.
Thanks for the video, perhaps when you get the Plexus P/20 running you can connect the Zaurus in VT100 mode?
That picture isn’t a gas cylinder it’s a motor. An electrical motor was supposed to be able to erase a tape.
Rainy Christmas here in the Midwest too. I think it hit 54ºF too.
Re: the Sharp Zarus. I was convinced in those days that I needed to have a organizer. I was just certain it was going to solve all my organization issues. I eventually had a Palm and then a Sony Clie. The Clie had a mp3 player built in. Anyway, I'm still not organized...
the paint prog is under the MORE button bottom left of the screen....
I kept wondering if I missed something in the video. More button! Click it!
Merry Christmas, Adrian. And a happy new one 🌲
Ohhh... The Adam tape drives reminded me. If you feel like it, the stringy floppy was a thing. It used a tape mechanism, but worked like a floppy. Much faster than a standard cassette drive, but not as fast as an actual floppy drive, as it was essentially a serial tape drive. But it would seek, had a table of contents, etc.
Would be worth a review if you feel like it. Kind of like how Zip drives were a thing, then died a sudden death. The stringy floppy was only around for a short time, IIRC.
Merry Christmas, Adrian 😀
I'm sure it's been pointed out already, but I think the scrapbook is the paint program
26:16 Huh. Everything in this box, including the cleaning fluid, but minus the cleaning tape, was kicking around the livingroom when I was growing up. My parents were cheap, so there's no way they spent nearly $70 on this kit. Best I can figure is that maybe this kit (or parts of it) got thrown in as a freebie when they purchased their VCR?
41:51 ...or maybe the cleaning tape *was* also kicking around. I remember the checkboxes on that labeling.
The VHS cleaning tapes are from a time where companies in europe/germany tried to use stickers to void warranty for PCs when opened. This made cleaning new VHS recorders a bad idea and for movie nights a quick clean with tape was easier
27:25 - a T-120 is similar to an E-180 in length. I found a FUJI E-180 and that claims to be 258m (846 feet) - so it's just slightly longer than the BASF T-120 at 246m. I've also found a BASF E-240 that states it's length as 343m (1125 feet) so that's probably much closer to a T-160. Somewhere I've got a T-180 made by BASF, not sure but I think that thinner tape must be similar to the E-300 (5 hours in PAL-SP) which are rare and were only made by a few manufacturers including BASF. BASF also made T-130/E-195 length tapes and I'm assuming these are the equivalents in NTSC/PAL because BASF uses yellow packaging for both versions.
Whoa, I wasn't aware that all VHS cassettes were chrome - there was I in 1984 (10 years old) paying top dollar for TDK's Super Avilyn E180 cassettes thinking they were something special...
They were all chrome, but the quality did vary-and the HG tapes were better, as a general rule...for example TDK EHG WAS better than the cheaper version-the difference was most noticeable on the longest-play mode(SLP/EP), but you could see the difference at all speeds.
Trichlorotrifloroethane is also known as CFC-113 or Freon 113 and was banned in 2000 for ozone depleting properties.
You missed the “More” button on the bottom left which is likely where the paint program along with other programs that lack a direct shortcut on the left/right panels.
Have you checked the "other" button for the paint program?
happy holidays
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year Adrian!
On the Sharp palmtop - are there more programs in the "More" button on the bottom left of the screen maybe?
The longest VHS tapes I recall were 300 - or five hour tapes. They were pretty expensive and since they seemingly used a thinner carrier material, it came with a warning on the early versions that it might cause tape salad... but 240 ones were the main go to format around here. Four hour recordings. But I only remember "LP" mode to double the length - also, yes, BASF is a German chemical company, so having German on the cover was a natural :D
Those VHS tapes were the more common E-240 and the rare/expensive E-300 for the PAL/SECAM market. There weren't any T-300 and afaik also no widespread T-240 VHS tapes made for the NTSC market. While the cassettes were essentially the same, the tape speed was different for NTSC and PAL, so an E-240 tape could only hold 173 minutes of video if used in a NTSC recorder, while a T-180 tape could hold 253 minutes of video if used in a PAL recorder. That's also why LP was more often used in NTSC countries while it was rarely used in Europe (and EP/SLP to triple the recording time wasn't even a thing at all).
Since this PDA has a terminal, could you use it with the SWTPC computer?