Wasn't there something similar with VHS tapes where you could drill a hole somewhere on the bottom and use them to record in an SVHS machine?

Paul

Yes, there was a hole in the bottom of the SVHS cassettes that indicated to the player that an SVHS cassette was inserted. The widespread belief (with considerable anecdotal evidence) was that the only difference from VHS and SVHS was the hole and the price.

8-inch and 5.5-inch floppy disks had the same "trick". the more expensive "Double-Sided" disks differed only by the presence of an additional notch, and the price. I still have a notching tool built for that purpose.

An error in that article--Betamax recorded one hour at SP and VHS recorded two hours, not three. The two-hour time was one of the factors in VHS's favor: the ability to deliver a standard two-hour movie. Years earlier when Sony introduced the Betamax, they assumed the primary purpose would be to time-shift TV, so no need for a two-hour capacity. Plus, Morita (the Prez of Sony) held up a paperback book when asked how big to make the shell, so there wasn't enough tape to store two hours. And people usually don't remember that porn was also a significant factor in VHS adoption--Sony wouldn't allow it on their format.

I can remember the old double-sided floppy trick. The manufacturers said however that only an official double-sided disk had been tested on that back side for reliability, so you took your chances otherwise. And I remember the "Twiggy" drive--I worked at Apple when the Lisa came out, and one of its features was a special floppy drive that used media with slots both on the far and near sides as you inserted them. The idea was that it was hard on the media to have a read head pressing on both sides of the disc. But the Twiggy disk allowed each head to be backed by a soft felt pad instead. The drives were fussy, though, and the idea never caught on. Twiggy drives went into the famous landfill when Lisa morphed into a Macintosh a few years later.

Not to give away my age, but in the early days of Betacam, there were two different tape types. 'Betacam Standard' and 'Betacam SP'. I'm not an authority on it but I recall different tape formulations that were not interchangeable. Betacam's s (portable) EFP/ENG small cassette, (up to 30 min.s) was indeed the same size as Sony's consumer Betamax format, (which 'lost' the consumer VCR format war to the larger (and inferior) VHS.

Betacam SP is still a valid media for professional post shops.