Audio Cassette
An audio cassette, AKA "Compact Cassette", was a popular medium for sound recording from the mid-1960s through the 1990s. Originally designed for such uses as office dictation (replacing earlier technologies such as the Dictabelt), it eventually achieved greater sound quality to permit it to be used for music, both for home recording, where it replaced reel-to-reel tape decks, and for sales of prerecorded music, where it was used alongside 8-Track tapes and vinyl records, and later CDs. Like all physical media, it has declined in use in recent years in favor of digital data.
In early home and hobby computers of the 1970s and 1980s, audio cassettes were often used as a data storage medium, until disk drives became sufficiently available and affordable to become the dominant means of storage.
Contents |
Types
Audio quality
Data formats
A number of early personal computers used audio cassettes to store programs and data.
- Apple II data cassette
- Atari data cassette
- Colour Genie data cassette
- Commodore data cassette
- CUTS data cassette (used on various 1970s-era systems)
- IBM PC data cassettee
- Kansas City Standard data cassette (used on SOL-20, Exidy Sorcerer, and others)
- KIM-1 data cassette
- TRS-80 data cassette
- Video Genie data cassette
- ZX Spectrum BLK format data cassette
Sticky-shed syndrome
Sticky-shed syndrome is a condition created by the deterioration of the binders in a magnetic tape, which hold the iron oxide magnetizable coating to its plastic carrier.
