This was cutting edge tech... I remember the excitement of replacing floppy discs with CDRs...
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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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!
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.
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.
For real? My tweaking days ended when floppy came out for the C64.
Maybe the C64 datasette never got the upgrade?
Boy, that was before I could afford a C64 with the money I made with my first computer.
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.
Me too! For some reason I was the only guy in school who could do that. Fun times. 😊
In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.
I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.
I guess I was lucky. My parents got me my first Commodore 64 C second hand, and it included the floppy drive. Guess it was affordable that way.
Ooh, I didn't have one of those fancy pieces of gear! I lived in a small town. Used to see disk notchers at the book/stationery store, which had the reputation of being slightly pricy place but was the only store in town that had computer stuff at the time.
Instead, I figured out a way to cleanly cut the notch using scissors. Two horizontal cuts, then two cross cuts, then carefully cut out the remainder.
Don't you use a flathead for that?
A flathead is still a screwdriver, is it not?
It was a Philips screw IIRC. You can also use a flathead screwdriver on them but you shouldn’t IMHO.
Then I misunderstood and was thinking of a different adjustment of the head. The one I was thinking about us when you wedge the screwdriver behind the head and bend it otwards a little for better contact. For that you need a flat tool.
I'm old enough to know why people used pencils for cassettes. It wasn't coincidence. Count the number of teeth in the casette, then look at the number of facets on a standard pencil.