Jokes aside, in my childhood we stored games on audio cassettes. But that’s not even surprising. During my college years in Russia, they came up with a cool thing for backups, ArVid. And we actively used it.
ArVid is an adapter to a VCR that connects on one end to a computer and on the other to the VCR, to use the latter as an external storage device. It’s amusing how it operates – encoding and decoding through an analog video input and output. Control of the VCR was essentially done via emulation of the standard IR remote control commands. But they’re different for all models! They created a “learning” mode for determining the IR command codes and the timing characteristics of the VCR rewinding, working with a specific VCR. During the training, the user had to position the standard remote control opposite the IR receiver of the ArVid unit, and at the training program’s request, press the buttons corresponding to each significant operation needed to control the VCR (Play, Stop, Rec, FF, Rev, etc.). A file profile of the specific VCR model is created based on the training results. Additionally, the manufacturer supplied a large number of ready-made profiles for popular VCR models of the time.
When something needed to be recorded onto a videotape, like a game distribution, for example, this gadget would emulate remote control rewinding, then it would start play, and decode the signal from the video output where, aside from the data, all sort of metadata was encoded allowing for further, more accurate rewinding. Each cassette could store up to 2-3 GB of data.
The developer – KSI Software – is still alive and on their website, “greetings from the nineties,” they still advertise ArVid. 🙂
I wonder if there’s a security risk in the possibility that a malicious spy employee could program, from scratch on a computer disconnected from the internet and with locked interfaces, a Javascript application that encodes a file into an image, captures it on video on a mobile phone, and decodes it accurately at home? Theoretically, this is possible, and the investment in typing such a program from scratch from a printout at home would “pay off” by the program then working for an hour and translating megabytes into changing QR codes on the screen.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 