hardware and software that is odd, forgotten, and obsolete! And today it is

this thing right here: the Datasonix Pereos cassette tape storage device

from 1994. You could get around a gigabyte of storage on a teeny

tiny little cassette tape that is a smaller than anything else that was ever

made on the consumer market. Yeah how does this work? Well let's dive right

into it! So this is the Datasonix Pereos, introduced at the end of 1994

for a suggested price of $795 US dollars. It is a data backup system that connects

via the parallel port and weighs just 10 ounces fully loaded, or around 280 grams.

And it fit in the palm of your hand and ran on just two AA batteries. So a

very tiny thing and that was a big selling point, but the most important one

was that is stored up to 1.25 gigabytes of data on tapes the size of a

postage stamp, being the equivalent of over 850 floppy disks. And this was at a

time when a 300 megabyte hard drive would still be considered quite large.

Even the Iomega ZIP drive introduced around the same time only held 100 megs

per disk and was much larger, and required an AC adapter to be plugged in.

So how did it pull it off? Well it all starts with these rebadged Sony NT

tapes, the smallest cassette tapes ever made. With these from Datasonix

costing $34.95 each on introduction. But yeah they really are just Sony NT tapes. They

were digital micro tapes that were originally launched in 1992 for use in

Sony field recording and dictation devices like the NT-1 and NT-2.

Sometimes marketed as the Sony Scoopman, they recorded digitally instead of the

analog method used on the more common Compact Cassette and Microcassette

recorders. And the resulting audio quality was notably high as demonstrated

in a short YouTube video by Techmoan some years back. A video that I do

recommend, so check it out! But yeah the NT was subsequently adapted for

data storage use in the early 90s by Datasonix, the company co-founded by

Juan Rodriguez: the serial entrepreneur and pioneer in development of computer

data storage products in and around Boulder, Colorado. And man this guy is

fascinating but the gist of his technical career is that he started at

IBM in 1963 where he left to co-found the Storage Technology Corporation,

aka StorageTek, in and around Louisville, Colorado in 1969. They became a Fortune

500 company by making tape and disk drives for various business computer

systems throughout the 1970's and early '80s. Rodriguez then founded Exabyte

alongside ex-StorageTek engineers in 1985, innovating in the area of higher

speed more reliable tape backup systems using helical scan technology. Their

breakout product was the EXB-8200 which they claimed was the world's first eight

millimeter helical scan computer storage subsystem. Then he was approached in 1992

about a new tape backup system in development using Sony's NT format. And

it was promising enough that he helped co-found the Datasonix corporation to

sell it under the name Pereos. Perry-ohs? Per-AY-ohs? I'm going with Pereos. And

why do they choose that name? Well, I can't find the original intent but I did

find that in Esperanto "pereos" is the future tense of "pereo," which means that

it translates to "impending doom" or "will perish." A great name for an ambitious new

product if I've ever heard one. Anyway the Pereos storage system was

achieved by building on the NT's non-tracking system, which "NT" stands

for, by the way. This meant instead of tracing each tape track individually the

rotary head inside could read multiple tracks at once. So it divided your data

into blocks of information all across the tracks of the tape in order to

achieve higher capacity and read/write speeds. To quote Mr. Rodriguez on the topic:

*Mat from YouTube channel 'Techmoan' reads the on-screen quotations*

Hmm funny how Juan Rodriguez sounds just

like Mat from Techmoan, what a coincidence...

Anyway the challenges Datasonix faced were immediately apparent, even with some

positive buzz in the press. It quickly dropped in price over the next two years

hitting $499 by 1995 and even after updating the software for Windows 95 it

was not long for this world. The product was dead by 1996 and the company along

with it, having produced only around 12,000 units. This was due to a variety

of factors and one of the biggest ones was that costs were just too high from

the very beginning, both at the end user level and manufacturing. Sony charged

them more than they had initially promised for the drives and tapes then

the final nail in the coffin was the value of the yen dropping from 110 down

to 79 per US dollar. And yeah it was just over for Datasonix. Mr. Rodriguez went

on to found Ecrix and improved the same package storage technology to develop

the VXB tape backup system, now owned by Overland Storage's Tandberg Data. And

along with some consultation work Rodriguez is currently an adjunct

professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. But yeah enough backstory let's open

the box and try this thing out! It took me quite some time to find one of these

things and so far it's the only complete example I've seen show up on eBay.

Well almost complete as it didn't come with the manual or the original disks.

But like I said it's the only one I found so I'll take it! It did come with a backup

CD-R of the software as well as an original Datasonix NT tape. And yes

you can just use regular Sony NT tapes as well. There's also an external power

supply in here if you don't want to use batteries. And the adapter that connects

to the base unit to provide the parallel cable connector and the compartment for

your two AA batteries. And finally there's the Pereos drive itself, tucked

away in this neat little box. And this is a very basic but rather pleasing design

if I do say so myself. It's about the size of an action camera

like a GoPro Hero or something, or maybe a small bar of soap. Feels good in

the hands and only has the one button on it, which is for ejecting the tape slot.

And like the Sony NT recorders it has this dual action mechanism going on

where one press opens the slot and the next one presents you the tray.

*satisfying tray-opening noises commence*

Now that is just satisfying. But yeah you get your tape installed in there and then plugged

into the adapter to get the parallel port and battery situation going on. And

then you plug this into your computer of choice, and this is Windows 3.1

compatible. So yeah it's plugged in let's get the software installed and get to

backing up some stuff on the world's smallest cassette tape! Right so I've got

an HP Vectra VL5 Pentium 133 system from the mid-90s that I found was pretty

appropriate for the era that this thing was in its prime. And the installation

was very straightforward, nothing really special there, you just install it. And

then it detected that the Pereos was plugged in and the parallel port was

configured correctly, and it seems to be. Let's go ahead and back some stuff up!

And yes this is the Datasonix Pereos software version 6.20. Yeah it is from

1997, this was distributed by J&J Peripherals in Colorado a little bit

after Datasonix went under. They sold this thing at a discount through the end of

the 90s or maybe even the very early 2000s from what I can tell from their

website archives. And yeah it's the Windows 95 version of the software. There was a

Windows 3.1 like I mentioned earlier but that's not what mine came with. So we're

just gonna go ahead and use this. The configuration is pretty simple, you can

do some stuff like setting up a password and select your different users, so you

can just have certain users doing certain things as far as backing up of only

certain stuff, if you want to protect things. You can clean the drive, erase the

tape and the label, repair it, and stats and all sorts of stuff. What does this drive

status do... alright cool, so yeah it tells me that I have it plugged in via AC

power, which I do. I don't have any batteries in there right now. Attached to

LPT1 and it is, uh yeah cool. Recommends that you clean

it every 12 hours. And yeah there were a few different things that it wanted me

to check out here and this is what I did: the "select optimal settings." And it did some

tests and this is what it came up with for as quick as I can because I have a

ECP/EPP enabled. Yeah let's go ahead and start saving some files!

Alright so here are the contents of my hard disk drive, it's only a couple gigs

this entire drive. Yeah let's just do something small here at first. I'm just

gonna back up the "Media" folder and that's it. Session name, okay yeah let's

just call this the "LGR Session 1." And here we go looks like it is going to try

and save some stuff on this blank tape that I have hmm.

How exciting! Oh my. It's making noises. I don't know how well you can hear that

let me get a little bit closer with my phone camera.

*tape drive noises do their thing*

Yeah it seems to be doing its thing.

That is awesome, it's at least making noise and spinning around and

numbers are happening so that's a good sign.

Alright it says it wrote everything to the tape, didn't have to do any

repositioning or rewrite counts. Compression is 1.17 to 1. Yeah,

it is automatically compressing those files just a little bit, although there's

not a whole lot to compress in this case. But yeah alright cool.

Well let's see if we can recover them! Man this is exciting. It sounds like I'm

being sarcastic but no seriously, this is exciting. I love using weird backup

systems, especially from tape. There's just something special about it. So it

shows my session here that we just had. Yeah here's the files available from

tape, that's everything! Uh, there it is! Now what I want to actually do here is

backup an entire game, like, several hundred megabytes. So it's probably gonna

take a little while. But I want to do it and just see if it gets everything

correctly -- oh crap I don't want to do that, no, don't -- I accidentally told it to

backup the entire hard drive. I mean, that'd be quite the test as well.

Uhh.

Sure why the hell not I mean, it's only 800 and something megabytes. Just

gonna call this "Vectra HDD," no password. Actually no I do

want a password. No I don't want a password. And yeah let's just reinitialize it, so

it's just gonna wipe out everything here and give the volume a new name. We're gonna

call that "LGR Backup." And here we go, so yeah this is the erase and labeling

tape setup process here, which it had me do when I was setting up the drive for

the first time. All right well that took a good couple minutes, a little longer

than it did to just wipe the initially blank tape. Which I guess that makes

sense because I had written some things on there. But now it's you know, doing the

backup process. All right there goes: 7,246 files,

around eight hundred and seventy three megabytes, yeah. Well I fully

anticipate this is gonna take a while so I'm gonna go ahead and cut off the

camera and then come back as soon as it's complete! So this is interesting, it

reached 95% of the 830 megabytes or so and it's saying that

both sides of the one tape are full. Oh well I do have another tape here, so I'm

gonna go ahead and let it keep going. Alright well that took just shy of three

hours, about two hours and 50 minutes. Had several repositioning cycles and a bunch

of the rewriting attempts, however it does seem to have gotten everything

saved. Although again it didn't actually do it all on one tape, I had to split it

up amongst one and a half. Yeah this was the exact amount that we tried to back

up here, 880 megabytes. Let's see if we can recover some of them now, so we go

back to introduce volume here and it's the same process all over again. I will

just let you know after this if it was able to fully recover a good chunk of my

files or not, be right back. Alright so it took almost exactly one hour to recover

that 168 megabyte game. I chose "POD." Let me go ahead and see if it did it

successfully. Nice! Well it runs like crap because this pretty much just running

software directly on a crappy like, 1 megabyte video chipset. So it runs like

garbage but it does run. That means it recovered everything that it needed to

to get the game loaded from the hard drive so that

is pretty friggin great. Gotta say it is mighty slow... but it does the job.

But I guess that's a trade-off that you make for not only using the parallel

port but also just being such a ridiculously portable audio format

that's been reconfigured for data storage. Still it works without a hitch,

that's something! Well that's about it for this episode of Oddware on the

rather fascinating Datasonix Pereos cassette tape backup system. I'm just

super amused that the Sony NT format was reused/repurposed for data storage.

I mean you know why not, right? There are plenty of tape-based storage

backup systems and of the others that I've used, especially those from Colorado

and Quantum and whatnot, this is the most interesting by far. Just due to the fact

that it uses this teeny tiny little postage stamp-sized things But at the

same time I also see why it didn't exactly succeed in any sense of the word.

It was just so expensive and you really didn't need to move around that much

storage very often. And if you did you're probably gonna go with one of the more

established tape backup systems, and so people did. But you know I'm glad

to have one of the 12,000 here, and I hope that you enjoyed taking a look

at it with me! And if you did then awesome, thank you very much. And perhaps

you'd like to stick around and see more of my videos: Oddware and hardware and