Why did we have tape decks, but not vinyl LP decks or CD decks?
Etymonline says it’s “in reference to the flat surface of old reel-to-reel tape recorders,” which supposedly resembled the deck of a ship.
Note that the term goes back to 1949, when the reels did lay flat on the surface rather than being perpendicular to it as they would be later.
Here’s one image and here’s a different model, both from 1949.
I don’t doubt that may be the origin, but nothing about these designs reminds me of a ship’s deck. Interesting that neither of those examples uses the word “deck”.
You don’t logic language. You approach it cautiously, assuming it might bite if disturbed.
Who says it is supposed to be a ship’s deck, as opposed to a deck more generally?
Because they were called ‘Record Decks’ instead.
Edit: and I think this makes sense of the term ‘deck’ - a record player/turntable is a flat horizontal ‘deck’ onto which you load the vinyl record.
By the time cassette tape player/recorder devices hit the market, the term ‘record deck’ was already established, so if you were adding a new tape player separate to your setup, it seems only natural that this additional music playing device would also be called a ‘deck’.
The term ‘CD Deck’ does also exist, but by the time CD players became mainstream, not so many people were buying separate audio components, so none of it was ‘decks’ or ‘amps’ or whatever, it was just ‘a HiFi’ or ‘a music centre’
The link at etymoline makes the history pretty clear.
And a quote of the OED at Wordwizard also hits that button, as an extension of flat surface from the original ship’s deck.
DECK: 3b) . . . . By extension, any kind of floor or platform, as the floor of a pier or landing-stage, or the platform or roadway of a deck-bridge. 3f) [1949] The surface of a tape recorder above which the tape moves, together with its attachments such as the motor(s) and other mechanisms, the magnetic heads, and the circuits immediately associated with them, the whole being built as a single unit; any device for moving tape from one spool to another past magnetic heads; more fully as tape deck. Also, the corresponding part of a system for playing gramophone [[phonograph]] records.
So ‘tape deck’ precedes ‘record deck’?
Ahoy there, shipmate! It’s a flat horizontal surface that hands manipulate things on. The posts that the spools fit on (or more so the longer one that the record fits on) even look like little masts…
I’ve heard people refer to CD decks. E.g., in cars. Similarly “stereo decks” to refer to car audio … decks.
They also have capstans (another nautical term).
Interesting. I can indeed find some references to this term but I’ve never heard anyone call it that.
musicradar, April 07, 2022:
2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Technics’ legendary SL-1200 turntable - arguably the most iconic DJing deck of all time - and to celebrate, the company has released a limited-edition model: the SL-1200M7L.
When I were a lad, the term “record deck” was a standard term synonymous with “turntable” for that part of a high end component system. Not any old cheap record player with an integrated amp & speaker.
ETA: googling the two terms seems to support the fact that they are still used this way.
I’m drawing a blank on trying to visualize a tape-playing-machine on which the reels lay perpendicular to the surface.
Now to be sure, a lot of tape machines stood upright (or could be operated either upright or laying down).
There was an entirely different (and, I thought, bizarre) usage of the word “deck”.
I worked in Data Processing in the early 1970s, when much data was still on stacks of punched IBM-style cards. I worked with several applications programs that dealt with such piles of data, and I studied their user manuals. (This was back in the day when there were user manuals, and sometimes people read them.)
I was very confused by their usage of the word “deck”, which I intuitively understood to mean a “deck of cards”, that is, a whole bunch of cards together. Something about the usage of the word “deck” just didn’t seem right.
Then I figured it out: In the Data Processing world of those days, a “deck” meant a single card, a.k.a. a unit record. It took me a long time to work my head around the usage that a “deck” meant a single card.
You’re right, of course. I was thinking of the reels being perpendicular to the table surface and often protruding like this.
But this confuses me. A single card was always a punch card (or punched card after the holes were made). But a deck was the collected group needed for a program. Here’s one of many examples I found.
In this blog post, I describe the interesting hardware and software techniques used in the vintage IBM 1401 computer to load software from a deck of punch cards.
And another from WIkiwand.
A punched card is a flexible write-once medium that encodes data, most commonly 80 characters. Groups or “decks” of cards form programs and collections of data.
Your firm had to be an outlier.
No, not my firm. I’m referring to application programs – one by some commercial firm (not my company) and one by a major computer manufacturer – for manipulating large amounts of data. Their user manuals consistently used the word “deck” for what we would call a “record” or a “unit record”.
I was a programmer and a computer operator, and the word “deck” (of cards) had always meant to me, a bunch of cards together, just as a deck of playing cards. Also from wikiwand:
Caption under this picture:
But these Data Processing applications had a jargon of their own.
I see. That’s a different use of “Data Processing” than I remember.
Did they use Fortran or were they beyond that by then?
Hey kids. Whenever you talk about how easy we had it in boomer times, imagine walking over to the computer center one day and then walking back the next to see if your program ran or if you made a typo in card #162? And it was uphill both ways. You wouldn’t last a day.