Compact-Cassette Tape
Donor: Anonymous
The Compact Cassette utilizes magnetic tape for recording sound. Earlier, magnetic tape was threaded from one reel, through one or more tape heads, to a take-up reel. The speed of the tape was carefully controlled by passing over a round shaft, called a capstan, that turned at a specified speed. Often tape players had two speeds: one slow speed allowed a long play time, but with relatively low sound quality; one fast speed had good sound quality, but a single tape might finish relatively quickly.
Although reel-to-reel tape was used in many applications, the separate tape reel and take-up reel were inconvenient and created a risk that the tape might become damaged. Thus, several mechanisms were developed to combine the tape reel and take-up reel in a single cassette. One early format involved the Stereo 8-track tape, followed by the Compact Cassette format in the 1960s.
Compact Cassettes had reasonable fidelity for their time, and were used for home recording, portable audio, and speech recording.
In computing, the Hewlett Packard HP 9830A calculator and computer, introduced in 1973, was one of the first desktop computers to use automatically controlled cassette tapes for storage. For home computers, Compact Cassettes were used in many home computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as an inexpensive alternative to floppy disks. Users, however, had to manually start and stop a cassette recorder to load or save data or programs. For example, the first version of the IBM PC in 1981 used a cassette port, and its ROM-based BASIC programming language had commands to load and store data with the cassette.
Compact Cassettes were largely replaced by hard drives, floppy drives, and CD-ROM drives in the 1990s.
References:
- Personal experiences of Prof. Henry Walker and his father Benjamin
- http://www.hp9825.com/html/hp_9810_20_30.html
