Kansas City Standard data cassette

Latest revision as of 00:29, 25 June 2016

The Kansas City Standard is a system for storing data on cassettes. It was devised at a symposium in Kansas City in November, 1975, convened by Byte magazine, which published the resulting standard in its February 1976 issue. This format was used by a number of systems, especially S-100 bus systems (the same sorts of systems that generally used CP/M when they acquired disk drives).

Sometimes software was distributed on cassettes with Kansas City Standard data on one side, and another format of the time, CUTS, on the other side.

In the late '70s, there was even occasional use of the Kansas City Standard format stored on a vinyl record, especially a thin "sound sheet" that could be bound into a magazine, sometimes referred to as a "Floppy ROM".

Unified Emulator Format (UEF) has been used to preserve the pattern of signals in such a cassette in a modern computer file.

Some systems using this cassette standard:

• Acorn
• Casio (calculators, keyboards)
• Exidy Sorcerer
• Ohio Scientific
• Processor Technology (SOL-20)

[edit] Documentation

• Byte article explaining this system
• Cassette interface assembly/testing manual from maker of SOL-20
• Wikipedia article

[edit] Software

• MS-DOS utility to decode KCS cassette data