David Hayward recalls the mighty tape but admits he liked Rick Astley in his youth
Hands up all those who fondly recall taping Radio One's Top 40 on a Sunday night and having to hit the pause button on the tape deck the second the DJ started to talk- then writing 'Top 40: 20/06/85' or something on the label and pocketing it for playing throughout the week while you did your homework.
The cassette tape was such a part of everyday life that we often forget just how much we handled these things back in the day. For most of us, there was hardly a day that went by when we weren't in possession of a tape. Usually, the tape contained music, but often it was the latest game on the ZX Spectrum or C64.
Take a look back at an 80s school yard and you'll see the youths of the time exchanging cassettes, with the vast number of Spectrum games they've somehow managed to copy scrawled in pencil on the inlay card.
Furthermore, you'd often find yourself with a pencil stuffed into one of the spools of the cassette and waving it around to gather up the tape that was often chewed up in the aging machine it was fed into. And let's not forget bypassing the write protection of a cassette by pressing some tissue or the torn corner of a piece of paper into the little holes on the top.
On the whole, cassette tapes were pretty sturdy. If you had a decent player and kept the heads clean, then a tape would last you for many happy years of use. Car stereos were usually the worst offenders for chewing tapes.
Its History
The cassette tape can trace its history back to 1935, when the first reel-to-reel tape recorder was released, called then the Magnetophon.
It wasn't until 1962 that Philips invented the compact cassette, and from there onward the design and function of the device improved until it became the familiar pair of spools over which were wound the length of tape that usually offered either 30 of 40 minutes per side.
The cassette tape enjoyed nearly three decades of unrivalled success. It wasn't until the early 90s that the sales of cassettes began to noticeably decline. Of course, the main culprit for the drop in sales was the Compact Disc. CDs were better quality, eventually cheaper to make and could hold significantly more data or music.
In the computing industry, the 8-bit machines had died out and their mode of storage, the tape, was far too slow and didn't have the technology behind it to compete with floppy disks and the eventual optical discs.
The cassette tape refused to die, though, and from around 2010 there appeared on the scene a kind of renewed interest in this now archaic form of storage. Data was still out of the loop, unfortunately, although some programmers still make 8-bit games on tape, but the music industry and audiobook developers saw a rise in sales.
The Good
Easy to carry around, universal and rugged enough to survive a trip to the beach. Tapes were the ideal portable medium for transporting audio and data.
The Bad
Finding an old tape and having to explain to the kids why you recorded yourself singing along to Rick Astley hits in 1988. Then trying to explain the fascination you had with The Bangles. All good times, though.
Did You Know...
• A C60 tape was around 300 feet in length, and a C90 was around 440 feet.
• Just for fun, if you could load a modern game by tape (as you did with the Spectrum, which took about 11 minutes for 128K), then Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel at 7GB would be 54,687 lots of 128KB. That would mean it takes 67,51 C90 tapes to store the game, and 422 days to load. I think.
• The longer the recording time of a tape, the thinner the actual tape was: C60 was about 18 microns thick, C90 was about 12 microns thick.
• The actual plastic box that hold the cassette is called a Norelco Box.