An interface design between the TI professional computer and a video cassette recorder

An interface controller was developed which connected a video cassette recorder with a Texas Instruments (TI) professional computer. The interface was designed to fetch data from the expansion bus memory of the microcomputer, convert it to serial data, process it, and write to a video cassette recorder after converting the data into analog form. The interface could also read serial data from a video cassette recorder, process it, convert it to parallel digital data, and write the data to memory in the microcomputer. A video cassette recorder was used to store as many as 104 megabytes of data out of the potential capacity of 2.8 gigabytes on a two-hour video cassette through the interface controller. The controller was implemented on a laboratory breadboard which limited the rate of data transfer.