The Tarbell Cassette Interface is an expansion card for use with the

Altair 8800 The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics and was sold by mail order through advertiseme ...

early personal computer, or other systems using the Altair's

S-100 bus The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE 696-1983 ''(withdrawn)'', is an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800. The bus was the first industry standard expansion bus for the microcomputer industry. computers, consisting of p ...

. It was designed by Don Tarbell and sold by Tarbell Electronics as early as 1976. At the time, it was considered to be fast, reliable, and popular. While supporting the 1975 Kansas City (Byte/Lancaster) standard, it also introduced a much faster Tarbell standard which became a ''de facto'' standard for

compact cassette The Compact Cassette or Musicassette (MC), also commonly called the tape cassette, cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Otte ...

data storage. Tarbell also sold other products, including TARBELL CASSETTE BASIC in 1978 and a

Shugart Associates Shugart Associates (later Shugart Corporation) was a computer peripheral manufacturer that dominated the floppy disk drive market in the late 1970s and is famous for introducing the -inch "Minifloppy" floppy disk drive. In 1979 it was one of the ...

-compatible dual disk drive subsystem. The latter includes a Tarbell

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined ...

interface, said to plug into any S-100 bus computer, introduced in 1979.

References

External links

The Tarbell Cassette Interface Manual
s100computers.com * ttp://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/d_tarbell.html Tarbell S-100 boards and docs {{Magnetic tape data formats Computer storage devices Home computer peripherals Tape-based computer storage Early microcomputers