Editor's note: "Tape" was once the originator of Apple's classic ipod from the 80's to the 90's. This article aims to let readers from the 00's recognize this legendary invention, as well as friends from the 80's to learn more about it! This article aims to let readers after 00 recognize this legendary invention, friends after 90 learn from the past, and friends after 80 learn from the past!

"Spellback Battle" in the Seven Seas Kenjin have the cloud: "Pillow fall more and more hair, favorite sandwich bread from the convenience store disappeared, these tiny despair continues to accumulate, only to make people grow up." -PanCorp's "Childhood Collapse" feature invites readers to re-examine the products of their childhood, so that your childhood will continue to collapse without stopping ψ(｀?) ψ

Have you seen the cool stuff below? For slightly older readers, it rides full of youthful memories. But for younger readers, it may not even be seen?

Recognizing cassette tapes has become a bit of an age revealer. pixabay

They're called "magnetic tapes," and they're used to record all sorts of information, and the 1980s and 1990s were the golden age of cassette tapes, which were used as a storage medium for everything from music and movies to computers. Various technology companies also designed a lot of classic audio and video players for magnetic tapes, such as the famous Sony Walkman Walkman. However, with the rapid development of storage media such as MP3, magnetic tapes have been gradually eliminated from the market, and many people believe that they have gone into the same history as BB call. But in fact, not only has the tape not disappeared, it has even been revitalized in the professional field, and has become an important storage tool that many high-tech companies and scientific institutions rely on. Let's take a look at the past and present of magnetic tape!

How tape works

Before we get into the history of tape, we need to understand the principles behind it.

Magnetic tapes are a form of magnetic storage, so what is magnetic storage? Simply put, it's the technology of storing data on a magnetic medium.

The principles behind magnetic storage are electromagnetic induction and electromagnetic current. Electromagnetic induction is the "magneto-electric" effect, where changes in magnetic fields generate electric currents, and current magnetism is the "electro-magnetic" effect, where changes in electric currents generate magnetic fields. These two effects gave scientists a new idea about data recording: since electricity can generate magnetism, and magnetism can generate electricity, wouldn't it be possible to store and output data by converting electrical signals into magnetic fields and recording them on magnetic substances, and then converting these recorded magnetic fields back into electrical signals? And this idea is the basic principle of magnetic storage.

When we write information, the current generated by the signal causes the electromagnet in the Record head to generate a magnetic field, which changes the arrangement of the magnetic powder on the tape, so that the information is recorded in a magnetic arrangement. To read it, all you have to do is reverse the magnetic field generated by the Playback head to generate an electrical current, and the information will be read out.

This is how tape works. Tape Recording Process History of Magnetic Tape

In 1888, Oberlin Smith, an American engineer, published an article arguing that magnetic storage phonographs could be designed by applying the principles of electromagnetic induction and the magnetic effect of electric currents, but Smith did not put his idea into practice. The Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen, on the basis of Smith's article, succeeded in designing the first magnetically stored phonograph in 1898, although he used a thin steel wire rather than magnetic tape as the magnetic substance.

Valdemar Poulsen's design for a magnetic-wire phonograph is preserved today in the Danish Museum of Science and Technology.

Poulsen's invention was a major breakthrough in magnetic storage technology, but it was soon realized that recording sound with a thin wire was inefficient and not easy to store, so many scientists invested in research to improve it. At that time, most of the scientists focused on the improvement of the fine steel wire, but the German engineer Fritz Pfleumer was a different way, Pfleumer thought that since it was to record the magnetic field, then the fine steel wire was changed to a paper tape coated with magnetic powder, theoretically also has the effect of recording, and this is easy to manufacture and store, and subsequent experiments have confirmed that his idea is correct. So in 1928, Pfleumer designed the world's first tape recorder.

Fritz Pfleumer and his tape recorder.

In 1935, the German company AEG received a license from Pfleumer to mass-produce the tape recorder, the Magophon, which was expensive and difficult to operate, so it was only used by the military. But after the Second World War, as the use of cassette tapes increased around the world, more and more companies started to develop better tape recorders.

In 1958, RCA in the US developed the first cassette tape recorder, with a plastic case to protect the tape and designed to be reversible. The length and quality of the recording was comparable to that of later cassette tapes, but it was not a market success because it was too large. However, the tape became an important reference for other companies in their product development.

In 1962, Philips invented the compact cassette tape, known as the cassette tape, which began to be used in the European market the following year. At the time, there were many formats of cassette tapes in circulation, and in order to capture the market, Philips disclosed the patent and format of the cassette tape in 1964, allowing all manufacturers to use it free of charge. This move really made Philips' cassette tapes so dominant that its main competitor, Sony of Japan, had to give up its own cassette tape development program.

The cassette (left) and RCA's cassette (right).

Once cassette tapes became a staple in the marketplace, they were soon used to play popular music, and companies aggressively introduced better music players. Sony didn't develop their own cassette, but they did launch the world's first cassette player, the Walkman, in 1979, which helped push cassettes to the top of the charts, and Sony made a lot of money off of both cassettes and the Walkman.

The Sony Walkman Walkman.

But as the saying goes, "What goes around comes around. With the advent of the compact disc and MP3 formats in the 1990s, cassette tapes and players were gradually replaced by CDs and CD players, and in 2001, Apple knocked the Walkman off the top spot with the introduction of the iPod MP3 Walkman. Since then, cassette tapes have faded from public life. While cassette tapes did fade away, magnetic tapes did not. In other areas, cassettes still shine!

The Life of Tape - Data Tape

Although magnetic tape was developed to record sound, it can also record computer data.In 1951, magnetic tape was first used to record computer data. Although the tapes used at the time were very large and could record very little information, their potential was still recognized by technology giant IBM. As IBM continued to improve magnetic tapes, magnetic tapes for computers (or data tapes) were successfully introduced into the commercial market in the 1970s, and their size and price were not only affordable for families, but also became the standard equipment for storing data on personal computers.

But with the rapid growth of optical disks and hard disks, data tapes have faded from the computer data storage scene since 2000. Just when many people thought that data tapes were going to fade away like cassette tapes, it took a whole new path.

When it comes to computer data storage, we all think of hard disks and solid state drives - after all, you and I are using them now - so how did tape come back into the picture? It's thanks to the tape agreement that IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Seagate jointly established in 1997 -- Linear Tape Open (LTO). LTO is simply a tape technology developed by the three companies*** together to improve tape performance. Like Apple's iOS system, LTO regularly releases new versions of its products, and the latest LTO-9 data tape has the same read/write capability as a hard drive, with a storage capacity of up to 18TB (45TB if compressed).

The LTO-2 data tape has three advantages over hard disks and solid state drives:

The LTO-2 data tape has the ability to read and write data on a single hard disk, and has a capacity of 18TB (45TB when compressed).

These advantages have led technology companies (such as Facebook and Google) and scientific organizations (CERN and NASA) with huge amounts of data, and even organizations that require high levels of data security (such as banks and the National Archives), to choose to use tape to store their data.

In 2011, Google's mailbox, Gmail, accidentally deleted mail from more than 40,000 accounts due to a bug in an update. Although Google had been storing copies of the data on hard drives in multiple data centers, some of the data was unrecoverable. Luckily, the data was backed up to tape and recovered.

I'm sure some readers are already thinking about getting an LTO data tape. But don't worry, the benefits of LTO are only available to companies and organizations that have the financial means to do so, and are not available to the general public.

Tapes sound great, so you want to get your hands on one? giphy

First of all, tapes are a lot cheaper than hard drives, yes, but tape drives aren't cheap, and the price of a tape drive can be a few thousand dollars at least. In addition, tapes can be stored for a long time, but it is in a special storage space with constant temperature and humidity, so you won't be able to set up such an environment for tapes. Therefore, the advantages of data tapes become disadvantages when they are put on the needs of the general public. Therefore, in general data storage, hard disks and solid state disks are still beating magnetic tapes on the ground. But it's not that tape isn't advanced, it's that it's so advanced that our wallets don't match up to it.

LTO tape drive price in US dollars, IBM website

With the rapid growth of the Internet, the amount of data it generates is getting higher and higher. According to International Data Information Corporation (IDIC), data on the Net is growing at a rate of 30% - 40% per year, but hard disk capacity is currently growing at less than half that rate. Data tape storage capacity, on the other hand, is growing at a rate of 33% per year and shows no signs of slowing down. Meanwhile, with the development of tape drives, the read and write speeds of data tapes are now as fast as those of solid-state drives. As a result, many believe that tape is likely to be the preferred choice for storing big data in the future.

Some technologies and inventions disappear from our daily lives, often because they can't keep up. But the example of magnetic tape shows us that after it disappeared from our lives, it instead became more advanced in the field of data storage. And as a part of my childhood memories, it's gratifying to see that not only is tape not obsolete, but it's still in the professional world today.

Of course, not only tapes, but also CD-ROMs, which are gradually being forgotten, and perhaps in the future there will be a major technological breakthrough that will allow it to make a great comeback and dominate the data storage world again!

Related tags: LTO data tape linear tape open technology audiotape current magnetic induction electromagnetic induction yahoo newtons pi radar carnation