After a visit to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park for the first time, I should really have updated the Katigori blog. But, after being sent this super geeky link about an Apple I’s data tape, I had to share.

I can remember my first computer, a TI 994A, which my brother would happily program in BASIC, though I was too young to grasp the concept, and generally used the computer to play games which slotted in. The link will illustrate this further, and scrolling down the page brings back vivid memories of it. Texas Instruments equipment was there for much of my early childhood, and it was second nature to pull out a hot cartridge to blow on it to cool it down before reinserting it, or playing Avalanche with the classic music and yetis.

The relation this has to the Apple I however, is the tape. I can remember loading one program into the computer from a tape. You’d leave it to run its course before you could use the program. Tapes were also used of course for backups of data, which seems alien now, as I’ve just backed up a collection of files on a 4.7GB DVD. Giga what? A Megabyte seemed impossibly huge then.

So yes, if you feel the need to be suitably geeky, download the data remix as a ringtone, and achieve new levels of geekdom.