Today I got to thinking about optical discs like DVDs and CDs and how they are edging out magnetic storage for portable data and home video. Floppy didks have been supplanted, in part, by recordable CDs and DVDs. Standalone DVD recorders are gradually replacing video-cassette recorders, and DVD rentals have already mostly replaced VHS rentals, at least where I live.
I am vondering, though… has anyone ever developed optical tape? It seems to me that one could hold a lot of data on a few hundred metres of optical tape, considering the data density even of CDs. Did mechanical problems make optical tape infeasible?
Back in 1993 or 1994, when Mini-Discs were introduced, I read an article (I think it was in Time) saying that, just as the VHS format had had to “battle” the Beta format to become the favored (and ultimately the only) format available to consumers, the Mini-Disc would have to go up against a not-yet-introduced form of digital tape. My memory may be a little fuzzy—I did read this article eleven or twelve years ago, after all—but I think the cassette was supposed to have the same size and dimensions of a standard cassette, but the tape inside would be made of a material similar to that used to make CDs. Oddly, I don’t remember the article saying that one of these tapes would be able to hold any more music than a standard cassette or CD, but you’d think it would, right? I do remember it saying that the machines that played these cassettes would also be able to play standard tape cassettes as well as the new kind, but that it would be able to rewind and fast forward much faster than the old tape players.
I think they called it DCC—Or D-something-C, anyway—and it stood for Digital-Something-Cassette. But I never saw one for sale.
Put “optical tape” into google and you get over 8000 hits so the so this isn’t rare, but it suffers form the fact that you can’t instantaneously access the song (video, data or whatever) you want. Even the high end stuff that can create an index still has to fast forward to the point you want. A lot of computer backups use optical tape although that is being phased out too. Our new computers at work use a writeable DVD drive that is soley dedicated to backing up the computer (even though it seems to me that the hard drive has something like 20 time the capacity of the DVD drive so it cannot possibly back up everything).