Editor’s note: There is a saying about the Seven Seas of Jianren in “The Incantation Back to Battle”:“There are more and more hair falling from the pillow, and the favorite food and bread disappears from the convenience store. These tiny despairs continue to accumulate, so that people can grow up.”——Fanke’s “Childhood Disintegration” topic this time completely inherited Qi Hai’s famous saying (tears), which started from the prawns in the 80s to the 90s, the ancestor of the iPod, “tape”. Let the post-00 readers know the legend, the post-90s friends review the past and learn the new, and the post-80s friends can learn from the past.
Have you seen the cool stuff below? For older readers, it is full of youthful memories. But for young readers, they may have never read it…
The name of this thing is “tape”, which can be used to record all kinds of information. The 1980s and 1990s were its golden age. From music, film and television to computer materials, tapes were used as storage media. Major technology companies have also designed many classic audio-visual players for tapes, such as the famous Sony Walkman. However, with the rapid development of storage media such as MP3, tape is gradually eliminated from the market, and many people think that it has entered history like BB call. But in fact, not only has the magnetic tape not disappeared, it has even been reborn in the professional field, becoming an important storage tool that many high-tech companies and scientific units rely on. Next, let us take a look at the past and present lives of tapes!
How the tape works
Before we talk about the history of tape, we must first understand the working principle behind the tape.
Tape isMagnetic storage In a way, what is magnetic storage?In short, yesTechnology for storing data on magnetic media。
The principles behind magnetic storage are “electromagnetic induction” and “current magnetic effect.”Electromagnetic inductionIt is the change of the magnetic field that will produce the “magneto-electricity” effect of the current;Current magnetic effectThe change in current will produce the “electromagnetism” effect of the magnetic field. These two effects give scientists new ideas about data recording: since electricity can generate magnetism, magnetism can also generate electricity, then convert the electrical signal into a magnetic field and record it on the magnetic substance, and then use these recorded magnetic fields to convert Can’t the storage and output of data be realized with the return signal? And this idea is the basic principle of magnetic storage.
When we want to write information, the current generated by the signal will makeRecord head The electromagnet produces a magnetic field, and this magnetic field will change the arrangement of magnetic powder on the tape, so that the information is recorded in a magnetic field arrangement.And when you want to read, just reverse it, letPlayback headAccording to the magnetic field generated by the arrangement of the magnetic powder, the current is generated in the reverse direction, and the information can be read out.
History of tape development
In 1888, American engineer Oberlin Smith published an article that he believed that a phonograph with magnetic storage could be designed by applying the principles of electromagnetic induction and current magnetic effects. However, Smith did not put his ideas into practice. According to Smith’s article, Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen successfully designed the first phonograph using magnetic storage in 1898, but he used a thin steel wire instead of a magnetic tape.
Poulsen’s invention was a major breakthrough in magnetic storage technology, but people soon discovered that using thin steel wires to record sounds was not efficient and difficult to store, so many scientists invested in research and improvement. At that time, most scientists focused on the improvement of the thin wire, but the German engineer Fritz Pfleumer took a different approach. Pfleumer believes that since it is to record the magnetic field, the thin steel wire is changed to a paper tape coated with magnetic powder, which theoretically also has a recording effect, and it is easy to manufacture and store, and subsequent experiments confirmed that his idea was correct. So in 1928,Pfleumer designed the world‘s first tape recorder.
In 1935, the German AEG company was authorized by Pfleumer to start mass production of magnetic tape recorders-Magnetophon. However, Magnetophon is not only expensive but also difficult to operate, so it is only used by the military. But after the Second World War, as the use of audio tapes around the world increased, more and more companies began to develop better tape recorders.
In 1958, RCA in the United States developed the first cassette tape, which was protected by a plastic casing and designed to be played back. The recording time and quality of this product are comparable to later cassette tapes, but it has not been successful in the market due to its large volume. However, the audio tape has become an important reference indicator for the product development of other companies.
In 1962, Philips invented the compact tape, which is what we are familiar with “Cassette tape“, and began to be used in the European market the following year. At that time, there were many formats of audio tapes circulating in the market. In order to seize the market, Philips published the patent and format of audio cassettes in 1964, allowing all manufacturers to use them for free. This move did make Philips’ cassette tapes become the mainstream of the market, and its main competitor, Sony of Japan, also had to abandon its own tape development plan.
After cassette tapes became the mainstream of the market, they were quickly applied to the playback of popular music, and various companies were also actively introducing better music players. Although Sony did not develop its own audio cassette, they launched the world‘s first portable cassette player – Walkman in 1979. The advent of the Walkman pushed the cassette tape to a peak, and Sony also made a lot of money by relying on the cassette tape and the Walkman.
But the so-called “prosperity and decline.” With the advent of CD and MP3 formats in the 1990s, cassette tapes and players were gradually replaced by CDs and CD players. In 2001, the iPod MP3 Walkman introduced by Apple became the leader of the Walkman. After that, the cassette tape gradually faded out of public life. Although the cassette tape did withdraw from the stage of history, the tape did not disappear. In other areas, the tape is still glowing!
The life of tape-data tape
Although magnetic tape was developed to record sound, it can also record computer data. In 1951, magnetic tape was first used to record computer data. Although the tape used at that time was very large and could record little information, its potential was still seen by the technology giant IBM. As IBM continued to improve tapes, computer tapes (or data tapes) successfully entered the commercial market in the 1970s, and their size and price were not only affordable by ordinary families, but also became standard equipment for personal computers to store data. .
However, with the rapid development of optical discs and hard disks, data tapes have gradually faded out of the field of computer data storage after 2000. Just when many people think that data tapes are going to withdraw from the stage of history just like cassette tapes, they have taken a new path.
When it comes to computer data storage, we first think of hard disks and solid state drives. After all, you and I are using them now. How did the tape return to this field? This is due to the tape agreement jointly established by IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Seagate in 1997-Linear Tape Open (LTO). Simply put, LTO is a tape technology jointly developed by three companies to improve tape performance. Like Apple’s ios system, LTO will regularly release new versions. At present, the latest LTO-9 data tape has the ability to read and write data no longer than the hard disk, and the storage capacity reaches 18 TB (if the data is compressed, Capacity up to 45 TB). In addition, compared to hard drives and solid state drives, data tape has the following three advantages in data storage:
- Network Anti-hack: Tapes require tape drives to read and write data, and tapes are usually stored in a tape library for storage. This state is equivalent to setting up physical protection to isolate hackers from attacks and reduce the chance of data loss and tampering.
- Document storage: Damage to the tape will also lose data if it is broken, but after the broken tape is reattached, it will only cause hundreds of MB of data loss. For professional storage equipment that stores terabytes of data, this loss can be said to be a trivial matter. The damage of the hard disk is very easy to cause the entire loss of data, which is very serious for professional storage equipment.
- low cost: A hard disk with a capacity of 1 TB costs about US$50, and a tape with the same capacity costs only US$5. Moreover, tapes are more durable than hard disks. Generally, the life of hard disks is about 10 years. As long as the tapes are stored properly, data storage for decades is not a problem. In addition, the operation of hard disks requires electricity (sometimes additional preparations are required for the heating of hard disks). Cooling equipment), and the tape itself does not consume power, it only consumes power when reading and writing data in the tape drive, so it saves power compared to hard disks.
These advantages make technology companies with huge amounts of data (such as Facebook and Google) and scientific units (CERN and NASA), and even institutions with high data security requirements (such as banks and the National Archives) choose to use tapes. Store data.
In 2011, Google’s mailbox Gmail accidentally deleted emails from more than 40,000 accounts due to an updated bug. Although Google has always used hard drives to store copies of data in multiple data centers, there are still some data that cannot be recovered. Fortunately, these data are all backed up to data tapes before they can be restored.
Seeing this, it is estimated that some readers already want to get a piece of LTO data tape. But don’t worry, the above advantages are only for companies and institutions with certain financial resources, and the general public cannot enjoy these benefits.
First of all, tapes are much cheaper than hard drives, yes, butTape drives are not cheap, The price of tape drives is at least a few thousand dollars. In addition, although the tape can be stored for a long time, it is in a special storage space with constant temperature and humidity. Presumably you would not set up such an environment specifically for tapes. Therefore, the advantages of data tapes are placed on the needs of the general public, but they become disadvantages. Therefore, in general data storage, hard disks and solid-state drives still press tapes on the ground. But it’s not that the tape is not advanced, but that it’s so advanced that our wallet doesn’t match it…
With the rapid development of the Internet, the amount of data generated by the Internet has become higher and higher. According to data from the International Data Information Corporation, Internet data is growing at an annual rate of 30%-40%, but the current growth rate of hard disk capacity is less than half of this rate. The storage capacity of data tapes is growing at an annual rate of 33%, and there is no sign of slowing down. At the same time, with the development of tape drives, the read and write speed of data tapes is no longer inferior to that of solid state drives. Therefore, many people believe that tape is likely to become the first choice for storing big data in the future.
Some technologies and inventions disappear from our daily lives, often because they cannot keep up with the times. But the example of tape tells us that after it disappeared from our lives, it has become more advanced in the field of data storage. As a part of my childhood memory, the tape is not only not eliminated by the times, but it is still shining in the professional field. It also makes me feel relieved.
Of course, not only tapes, but also the gradually forgotten optical discs, maybe a major technological breakthrough will suddenly come in the future, let it come to a Jedi counterattack, and it is not impossible to dominate the data storage world again!
Reference
- Magnetic Tape
- Magnetic storage
- Cassette tape
- Linear Tape-Open
