CompuServe Messages

The Abekas originally used its own data format on the tape. All tape devices just write "blocks" of data of a given size, and it's up to applications to pack and decipher the raw tape data. In the Abekas's case, it dumped the raw digitized video data to tape. So software like ASDG's reads and writes the Abekas' format of data. When I said "my" utilities, I didn't mean a product from my company, I meant some other freeware tools I'd collected and massaged a bit to make them more useful. For example, I have several versions of 'tar', a popular Unix utility for backing up files to tape. Newer Abekas machines will read 'tar' files that contain Targa image files, as I understand it, which makes the older proprietary format less useful. You could easily build a 'tar' tape of Targa files with the freeware 'tar' I found, for example.