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Low tech sometimes succeeds where high tech fails – as one ingenious company is proving.
Chirp sends data over sound, a burst of audio that usually sounds like a bird's tweet. It doesn't transmit much data – 50 bytes – but it turns out you don't need much bandwidth to bridge the gaps between the real world and the digital world.
Chirp has already been put to use, and unusually for a small company, boasts hundreds of millions of users. Spun out of research at UCL, Chirp first stepped into the public eye four years ago with a consumer app. But it recently switched to a B2B model – licensing the technology for use in all kinds of cases via a software development kit.
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Sound has obvious disadvantages. One is that it needs to deal with noise interference, which is everywhere. And in the open, the range is short: 10 to 20 feet. But the big advantage is easy to miss: the audio bursts are a one-to-many, multidirectional transmission. So Chirps can be used as a signal – say a trigger, or a wake up call – for millions of digital devices at once. It can be played at a stadium, for example.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday November 11 2016, @12:49PM
I recall the tape drive being quite solid, more came down to tape- and player quality. Also what you used to make the copies and at what speed you copied the tapes. The Microdrive on the other hand what a nightmare that was - it was "fast" but so unreliable and it broke quite often - also it was quite expensive.
Overall the C64 and similar systems at the time had similar problems and issues with their tape drives. I seem to recall having more issues with the C64 tapeplayer then I had with the one for the ZX. But the 1541 sure did solve most of those issues as once you went floppy you just never got back to using tape again.