{"id":58,"date":"2007-03-16T18:40:01","date_gmt":"2007-03-17T01:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/2007\/03\/16\/the-kansas-city-standard\/"},"modified":"2009-06-03T11:05:53","modified_gmt":"2009-06-03T18:05:53","slug":"the-kansas-city-standard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/2007\/03\/16\/the-kansas-city-standard\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kansas City standard"},"content":{"rendered":"

During episode #66<\/a> of This Week in Tech<\/a>, host Leo Laporte<\/a> reminded his fellow pundits that August 2006 marked the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC<\/a>. It cost $1565—a fairly inexpensive computer in those days—but Leo noted that’s because it didn’t come with a hard drive, only a cassette port. John C. Dvorak<\/a> immediately asked, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Does anyone remember if that used the Kansas City standard?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

[flashvideo file=http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/twit0066.mp4 height=60 width=450 \/]<\/p>\n

My reaction was the same as Leo’s: Kansas City standard? Is that a joke?<\/em> I grew up in K.C.<\/a> and have lived there most of my life, and yet I’d never heard of such a thing.<\/p>\n

This thirty year-old standard was actually fairly revolutionary. According to Wikipedia<\/a>, it was one of the first standards to allow consumer-quality audio cassettes to store computer data. It was thus a catalyst in the rise of the personal computer, offering home users inexpensive data storage at a time when floppy disk drives cost around $1000.<\/p>\n

An example comes from personal experience. I recall my dad’s old TI-99\/4A<\/a> having a cassette port to which he had hooked up an even older portable tape recorder. I’d use it to save my little BASIC<\/a> programs and whatnot. I could turn off the computer then come back the next day, playback the tape, and pick up where I left off…hopefully. (As Leo says, those cheap tapes weren’t particularly reliable.)<\/p>\n

Despite reliability issues, the Kansas City standard remained influential. It even spawned a completely new type of computer data storage: vinyl records! That’s right; old-fashioned 33\u00e2\u2026\u201c RPM records were once used for recording high-tech digital data—formatted according to the Kansas City standard, of course.<\/p>\n

\"Kansas<\/a><\/p>\n

And all this time I thought my home town was known only for its barbecue<\/a> and jazz<\/a>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During episode #66 of This Week in Tech, host Leo Laporte reminded his fellow pundits that August 2006 marked the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC. It cost $1565—a fairly inexpensive computer in those days—but Leo noted that’s because it didn’t come with a hard drive, only a cassette port. John C. Dvorak immediately asked, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,13,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware","category-personal","category-trivia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}