Cassette

A cassette, cassette tape, compact cassette, or tape cassette is a plastic container with magnetic tape or film that stores audio, video, or other data. Cassettes are played using a cassette player or other drive. The picture shows an audio cassette used with earlier stereos. Audio cassettes were later replaced by CDs (compact discs).

Cassette history

Tape cassettes were create by Lou Ottens and his team at Philips and introduced in September 1963. The cassette was initially designed for dictation machines but was most commonly used to record audio for use with stereo systems found at home and in the car. Some early 1970s and 1980s computers also used cassettes for storage instead of floppy diskettes because they were a cheaper solution.

One of the first computers to use cassettes to store data was the Hewlett-Packard HP 9830 desktop. Some other early computers, like the first IBM PC, also had a cassette port that allowed for an optional external cassette recorder to be connected to the computer. Cassettes remained popular with computers until the early 1980s when floppy disk drives and hard drives became the premier solution.

DCC, Hardware terms, Obsolete, Sequential access, Storage device, Tape, Tape drive terms, VHS