Magnetic tape
Videos
Page
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnetic tape could with relative ease record and playback audio, visual, and binary computer data.
7-inch reel of ¼-inch-wide audio recording tape, typical of consumer use in the 1950s–70s.
Compact Cassette
A VHS helical scan head drum. Helical and transverse scans made it possible to increase the data bandwidth to the necessary point for recording video on tapes, and not just audio.
Small open reel of 9-track tape
Magnetic storage
Videos
Page
Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is accessed using one or more read/write heads.
The programmable calculators of the HP-41-series (from 1979) could store data via an external magnetic tape storage device on microcassettes.
Hard drives use magnetic memory to store giga- and terabytes of data in computers.