The archive tapes were saturated with insecticide, so bugs would not be inclined to chew up your stored info.
There were also separate mechanical duplicators, plus multi-layer tape so that ordinary terminals could make more than one copy in real time.
For RS-232 electrical reliability, it's hard to beat a design intended to allow any pins to be connected to + or - 25 volts or ground in any combination without doing any damage to the equipment at either end.
Plus not restricted to the minuscule cable-length specifications of USB, and to reach the rest of the conected (by phone) world, the same EIA open-source digital protocol was just modulated/demodulated to analog audio upon send/recieve.
Remember RS-232 was always expected to be at least building-wide if not site-wide, depending on the size of the site.
Ordinary data communication at relatiely slow speeds has benefits that might as well be taken advantage of when they are needed.
Of course no code was absolutely required for any of these processes, but you could still seamlessly share ASCII files between Apple, Commodore, DOS PC's etc. using native COM port commands.
To get more speed between two points, on early PC's you could get software to multiplex more than one COM port to handle a single data stream over multiple signal pairs.
When needed, this would require and tie up multiple phone lines to reach off-site but it worked, plus it was the same technique on your own local copper but then it was more feasible to be always on.
Many buildings were originally equipped with top-quality AT&T/Bell copper pairs each dedicated to a separate signal for each (prospective) phone line to each office through its on-site relay box. At the time many of these pairs were rapidly becoming idle with the arrival of the modern office multiline phone which ran on fewer pairs, or had its own dedicated wiring installed at deployment.
With Windows 9x, COM port multiplexing was built into Windows, and with the arrival of the 115Kbaud UART's you could theoretically get 460Kbaud between offices by running four 3-conductor DB9 cables from the phone access plate on the nearest office wall, and using a PC having connectors for the full 4 COM ports which had become standard on motherboards.
The archive tapes were saturated with insecticide, so bugs would not be inclined to chew up your stored info.
There were also separate mechanical duplicators, plus multi-layer tape so that ordinary terminals could make more than one copy in real time.
For RS-232 electrical reliability, it's hard to beat a design intended to allow any pins to be connected to + or - 25 volts or ground in any combination without doing any damage to the equipment at either end.
Plus not restricted to the minuscule cable-length specifications of USB, and to reach the rest of the conected (by phone) world, the same EIA open-source digital protocol was just modulated/demodulated to analog audio upon send/recieve.
Remember RS-232 was always expected to be at least building-wide if not site-wide, depending on the size of the site.
Ordinary data communication at relatiely slow speeds has benefits that might as well be taken advantage of when they are needed.
Of course no code was absolutely required for any of these processes, but you could still seamlessly share ASCII files between Apple, Commodore, DOS PC's etc. using native COM port commands.
To get more speed between two points, on early PC's you could get software to multiplex more than one COM port to handle a single data stream over multiple signal pairs.
When needed, this would require and tie up multiple phone lines to reach off-site but it worked, plus it was the same technique on your own local copper but then it was more feasible to be always on.
Many buildings were originally equipped with top-quality AT&T/Bell copper pairs each dedicated to a separate signal for each (prospective) phone line to each office through its on-site relay box. At the time many of these pairs were rapidly becoming idle with the arrival of the modern office multiline phone which ran on fewer pairs, or had its own dedicated wiring installed at deployment.
With Windows 9x, COM port multiplexing was built into Windows, and with the arrival of the 115Kbaud UART's you could theoretically get 460Kbaud between offices by running four 3-conductor DB9 cables from the phone access plate on the nearest office wall, and using a PC having connectors for the full 4 COM ports which had become standard on motherboards.