History Main / ComputerEqualsTapedrive

* In ''LightNovel/KinosJourney'' one country obviously has very highly advanced technology, but the computers there apparently still use tape drives.

* In the original ''Comicbook/XMen'' comic in the '60s, Cerebro (!) had a tape drive.

* In the [[UsefulNotes/The8bitEraOfConsoleVideoGames 8-bit Era]] of home computers (Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Dragon, TRS-80 and the like) software was available on cassette tapes, which were the exact same format as the Compact Cassettes that younger tropers associate with the 1990s for some reason (but were actually invented in the 1960s and were just as prevalent in the 1980s).
** In fact, certain systems, (the ZX Spectrum and TRS-80 Color Computer in particular, as well as the Apple ][,) actually used standard cassette players as their tape "drives" and you could hear the software if you played the software tapes in a standard Hi-Fi (which also meant that a dual deck cassette deck of the sort that was common in the early 1990s made a perfect copying device!). If you did your own programming you could record to them as well, making them the exact precursor to home use floppy drives.
*** On that note, the Famicom, the Japanese version of the UsefulNotes/NintendoEntertainmentSystem, had a tape recorder accessory that worked in tandem with the Famicom Keyboard to let one save and recall the programs they’ve written in Famicom BASIC onto tape. Some games (like VideoGame/WreckingCrew) even used the Famicom Keyboard and tape recorder to make save games before battery backed RAM and flash memory were affordable solutions to include on cartridges. To load (precompiled) games directly from tape, however, required a third party device called a Fukutake Studybox. None of these devices left Japan.

No longer as common, since in RealLife, almost everybody[[note]]except certain industrial class backup systems[[/note]] has stopped using the old-fashioned 9-track mag tape reel because of size and cost. A 6250 bpi, 1600 foot tape could hold, at most, a little over 100 megabytes of data,[[note]]the normal maximum block size is 32760 bytes, and each 32760-byte block takes, with the gap following it, 5.992 inches[[/note]] and costs about US$12. By 2012, it was possible to walk into a stationery store and buy a microSD card the size of a man's thumbnail for close to $12, and it would hold at least 4 billion bytes, or about 50 times as much as the above tape reel. And that's not even the cheapest example. A top-of-the-line 4 terabyte[[note]]that's 4 ''trillion'' bytes[[/note]] hard drive could often be purchased at or under US$200.[[note]] And the price has gotten even cheaper. As of December 2019, that 4 trillion-byte external hard drive is now available as made to military standards to survive a ''4-foot drop'' and still work flawlessly, and costs $120. They're not kidding about the size ether, in Windows, right-clicking on a drive and clicking on properties on one of these will inform you that, coming from the factory, formatted, the drive has "4,000,412,387,568 bytes free."[[/note]] That means data storage on modern hardware is ''thousands'' of times cheaper today, and that's before factoring in inflation.[[note]]It's impractical to use because of extremely slow random access, not because of low capacity and high cost. Most have moved on to modern tape cassette drives, which have a capacity of up to [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History 12 terabytes.]][[/note]]

*** On that note, the Famicom, the Japanese version of the UsefulNotes/NintendoEntertainmentSystem, had a tape recorder accessory that worked in tandem with the Famicom Keyboard to let one save and recall the programs they’ve written in Famicom BASIC onto tape. Some games (like VideoGame/WreckingCrew even used the Famicom Kay board and tape recorder to make save games before battery backed RAM and flash memory were affordable solutions to include on cartridges. To load (precompiled) games directly from tape, however, required a third party device called a Fukutake Studybox. None of these devices left Japan.

*** On that note, the Famicom, the Japanese version of the UsefulNotes/NintendoEntertainmentSystem, had a tape recorder accessory that worked in tandem with the Famicom Keyboard to let one save and recall the programs they’ve written in Famicom BASIC onto tape. To load (precompiled) games directly from tape, however, required a third party device called a Fukutake Studybox. None of these devices left Japan.

Superseded by ComputerEqualsMonitor. It might seem weird, but [[http://www.securitronlinux.com/bejiitaswrath/computer-tape-drives-coming-back-to-the-computers-of-2012/ the tape drive is not exactly extinct]] as a storage medium, and modern ones as of June 2018 can store up to 12 TB of data. Their niche today is generally backups for large multinational enterprises. Of course it's worth noting that they currently have no real technical advantage over hard drive backups, other than being compatible with older systems. As for appearing in film, most filmmakers give the modern drive a pass since modern LTO tape drives don't look anything like those tape drives of old and are so uncommon that not many people have seen one; the tapes look like small videocassettes (nothing like the big open-reel tapes that used to be common) and the drives mount in the same bays as CD/DVD drives. Not to mention that the lack of activity indicators on one and the inability to see the tape reels spinning, as well as the above-mentioned speed issue, makes it a very boring subject to film.

This was primarily done because the computer itself is very visually uninteresting when in operation. [[RuleOfPerception When a Tape Drive is operating, there is obviously something going on.]]

* Surprisingly, magnetic tape drives ''are'' still used in the modern day, and new developments are still being made; as of December 2017, Ultrium LTO-8 tapes are available, storing 12TB of uncompressed data (30GB compressed, with an effective hardware compression ratio of 2.5:1). They're mainly stored in a backup location far from the main site of the source data, used as a long-lived backup and/or to replace data in case of a disaster. The reason is that magnetic tapes can be easily swapped quickly (since only the tape needs to be replaced) while hard drives cannot (unless the center pays for a hard drive that can, which can cost thousands). Also, when properly stored, in a dry and climate-controlled environment, magnetic tapes last for ''decades'', moreso than hard drives or [=CDs=].

[[caption-width-right:300:[[ItBelongsInAMuseum That belongs in a]] [[http://www.computerhistory.org/ museum!]] ]]

* NORAD in ''Film/{{Wargames}}'' has dozens of spinning tape drives and hard drive platters, which would be expected in the early '80s. But then an [[AIIsACrapshoot intelligent supercomputer named WOPR is installed]].
* In ''Film/WeirdScience'', also set in the '80s, Watt uses his home microcomputer to simulate a girl, but when he can't go further with it, Watt's friend Gary urges him to [[HollywoodHacking hack into a government mainframe to tap into its processing power]]. Several tape reels start spinning in the background as soon as he starts breaking in, and actually connecting to it brings a doll to life.
* In the film ''Film/FailSafe'' a (for then) large mainframe computer is focused upon, complete with tape drives.

-->'''Darth Vader:''' We have the ability to destroy a planet and ''tape'' is the best backup medium we have?

* In ''Film/CaptainAmericaTheWinterSoldier'', Cap and Black Widow stumble upon an old SHIELD lab and an early 80's-era computer complete with this function. It turns out that the computer is [[BrainUploading much more advanced]] than they initially thought.
* In ''Film/IronSky'', the moon-nazi scientist doesn't believe that a smartphone is really a computer. He points to, yes, a room-filling beast of a computer with tape reels and blinky lights and says, "That's not a computer. ''This'' a computer!" He's forced to admit his machine is woefully out-of-date upon actually ''using'' said phone. He then reverse-engineers the phone's USB jack and uses it to [[spoiler: run a space cruiser]].

* The memory banks from the videogame ''VideoGame/EvilGenius'' are big mainframes with a nine-track tape drive, which makes sense since the game is a 1960's DiabolicalMastermind simulator.
** Also somewhat justified in that those items are pure memory banks, and the actual computing is done with a separate item looking more like a large desk (think N.A.S.A. computers in ''Apollo 13'')
* Surprisingly, most videogames - even current ones - where you get to see large, room-sized server farms (or mainframes, or whatever) seem to have at least one instance of a spinning tape animated texture slapped on a large block of metal.
** It's justified in ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' as well, since it takes place in the ''actual'' 1960s. Granted, this world has been shown to have more advanced science than its period (or our own, or [[MST3KMantra the laws of physics]]), but nothing that would have been out of place in a sci-fi flick of the period, which still probably would have featured tape drives.

* ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' had "memory tapes." (The TNG era sensibly replaced them with "isolinear chips", which seem to be a combination of flash memory cards and processing elements.)
** At its premier, TOS was virtually an ''aversion'' of the trope: yes, they were tapes, but they were hand-held tapes (about the size of a deck of cards) that could store HUGE amounts of data and be accessed very quickly, which at the time was laughably far-fetched. It would be the equivalent of a standard magnetic platter hard-drive the size of a postage stamp that could store the entire internet. [[WordOfGod The creators]] have actually come out and said that they ''didn't'' want to expressly use tapes or "normal computer processing noises," but thought it would have been [[WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief been too unfamiliar and broken the glamor]].
* ''Series/DoctorWho'' in the 1960s, of course, although some episodes set in the future eschew the tape drives for more blinking lights. An {{JustForFun/egregious}} example in the First Doctor serial ''[[Recap/DoctorWhoS3E10TheWarMachines The War Machines]]'': [=WOTAN=], the MasterComputer, is expectedly chock full of blinking lights and tape drives - but ''so are the titular War Machines'', which were built on the mastercomputer's specifications. But that's not the best bit. The War Machines, which were largish mini tanks that roamed the streets of London, had the tape drives mounted on the outside.
* From ''Series/{{Thunderbirds}}'', Thunderbird 5, the manned observation satellite from which poor, neglected John Tracy monitored the world's radio airwaves for distress calls, used reel-to-reel memory exclusively.
* In ''Series/{{Lost}}'', the computer room in the first hatch (Desmond's, the Swan, 2nd season) has 'em. Whether or not the inclusion is realistic, it's good for maintaining that Forbidding Doomsday Computer vibe. The overall effect of pairing this visual with the song "Make Your Own Kind of Music" is positively surreal (especially compared to the outdoors setting that formerly predominated).
** It's established later in the series that the installation and computer were set up in the late 70s and then [[spoiler: mostly]] isolated from the outside world, so the tape drives (and monochromatic text-prompt computer interface) are completely era-appropriate.
* In the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series ''Series/{{UFO}}'' a montage of flashing lights, spinning tape drives, blocky letters on coloured monitors, swaying female buttocks, and rows of large luminous buttons accompany every RedAlert.
* Averted in ''Series/AForAndromeda'' (written by astronomer Fred Hoyle who used computers in his work). The protagonist has to destroy ''all'' the components of the MasterComputer to be sure it won't be rebuilt.
* Graeme's computer in ''Series/TheGoodies'' featured a large, obvious tape drive, although that was far from the oddest thing about. Spoofed in the 2005 "Return of the Goodies" documentary where a now middle-aged Graeme tries to insert an enormous disk (or possibly tape cartridge) in his computer.
-->"I'll pop it on the laptop. Hang on, it's not compatible. I shall give it an upgrade. ''([[PercussiveMaintenance hits it with a mallet]])''
* ''Series/{{Banacek}}'': In "If Max Is So Smart, Why Doesn't He Tell Us Where He Is?", the object stolen is Max, a 1970s supercomputer with spinning tape drives and blinking lights that takes up half a room.

* In ''Film/TheItalianJob1969'', all the traffic lights in Turin were controlled by computer. The heroes caused a massive traffic jam by sneaking into the computer center and hanging a magtape that made the whole system go haywire. Presumably the control software read the tape automatically, as no other interaction was needed. It shouldn't have worked anyway - when the tape is shown being read, it's actually twisted over the heads, and should therefore be unreadable

* ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' had "memory tapes." (The TNG era sensibly replaced them with "isolinear chips", which seem to be a combination of flash memory card and processing element.)

* Kaos, a major antagonist in ''DonkeyKongCountry3DixieKongsDoubleTrouble'', is a robot with a tape drive prominently featured in his design.

* ''VideoGame/WolfensteinTheNewOrder'' zig-zags this; the game is set in an AlternateUniverse where Nazi Germany won World War II thanks to [[StupidJetpackHitler super-science]] provided by the BigBad Deathshead. As a result, the Germans have personal computers and even an elaborate moon base in the 1960s... but the launch codes for a stolen nuclear submarine (which are stored at said moon base) come in the form of punchcards.

No longer as common, since in RealLife, almost everybody[[note]]except certain industrial class backup systems[[/note]] has stopped using the old-fashioned 9-track mag tape reel because of size and cost. A 6250 bpi, 1600 foot tape could hold, at most, a little over 100 megabytes of data,[[note]]the normal maximum block size is 32760 bytes, and each 32760-byte block takes, with the gap following it, 5.992 inches[[/note]] and costs about US$12. By 2012, it was possible to walk into a stationery store and buy a microSD card the size of a man's thumbnail for close to $12, and it would hold at least 4 billion bytes, or about 50 times as much as the above tape reel. And that's not even the cheapest example. A top-of-the-line 4 terabyte[[note]]that's 4 ''trillion'' bytes[[/note]] hard drive could often be purchased at or under US$200.[[note]] And the price has gotten even cheaper. As of December 2018, that 4 trillion-byte external hard drive is now available as made to military standards to survive a ''4-foot drop'' and still work flawlessly, and costs $120. They're not kidding about the size ether, in Windows, right-clicking on a drive and clicking on properties on one of these will inform you that, coming from the factory, formatted, the drive has "4,000,412,387,568 bytes free."[[/note]] That means data storage on modern hardware is ''thousands'' of times cheaper today, and that's before factoring in inflation.[[note]]It's impractical to use because of extremely slow random access, not because of low capacity and high cost. Most have moved on to modern tape cassette drives, which have a capacity of up to [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History 12 terabytes.]][[/note]]

No longer as common, since in RealLife, almost everybody[[note]]except certain industrial class backup systems[[/note]] has stopped using the old-fashioned 9-track mag tape reel because of size and cost. A 6250 bpi, 1600 foot tape could hold, at most, a little over 100 megabytes of data,[[note]]the normal maximum block size is 32760 bytes, and each 32760-byte block takes, with the gap following it, 5.992 inches[[/note]] and costs about US$12. By 2012, it was possible to walk into a stationery store and buy a microSD card the size of a man's thumbnail for close to $12, and it would hold at least 4 billion bytes, or about 50 times as much as the above tape reel. And that's not even the cheapest example. A top-of-the-line 4 terabyte[[note]]that's 4 ''trillion'' bytes[[/note]] hard drive could often be purchased at or under US$200.[note] And the price has gotten even cheaper. As of December 2018, that 4 trillion-byte external hard drive is now available as made to military standards to survive a ''4-foot drop'' and still work flawlessly, and costs $120. They're not kidding about the size ether, in Windows, right-clicking on a drive and clicking on properties on one of these will inform you that, coming from the factory, formatted, the drive has "4,000,412,387,568 bytes free."[/note] That means data storage on modern hardware is ''thousands'' of times cheaper today, and that's before factoring in inflation.[[note]]It's impractical to use because of extremely slow random access, not because of low capacity and high cost. Most have moved on to modern tape cassette drives, which have a capacity of up to [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History 12 terabytes.]][[/note]]

No longer as common, since in RealLife, almost everybody[[note]]except certain industrial class backup systems[[/note]] has stopped using the old-fashioned 9-track mag tape reel because of size and cost. A 6250 bpi, 1600 foot tape could hold, at most, a little over 100 megabytes of data,[[note]]the normal maximum block size is 32760 bytes, and each 32760-byte block takes, with the gap following it, 5.992 inches[[/note]] and costs about US$12. By 2012, it was possible to walk into a stationery store and buy a microSD card the size of a man's thumbnail for close to $12, and it would hold at least 4 billion bytes, or about 50 times as much as the above tape reel. And that's not even the cheapest example. A top-of-the-line 4 terabyte[[note]]that's 4 ''trillion'' bytes[[/note]] hard drive could often be purchased at or under US$200. That means data storage on modern hardware is ''thousands'' of times cheaper today, and that's before factoring in inflation.[[note]]It's impractical to use because of extremely slow random access, not because of low capacity and high cost. Most have moved on to modern tape cassette drives, which have a capacity of up to [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History 12 terabytes.]][[/note]]

* In ''Film/TheItalianJob1969'', all the traffic lights in Turin were controlled by computer. The heroes caused a massive traffic jam by sneaking into the computer center and hanging a magtape that made the whole system go haywire. Presumably the control software read the tape automatically, as no other interaction was needed. It shouldn't have worked anyway - when the tape is shown being read, it's actually [[SurroundedByIdiots twisted]] over the heads, and should therefore be unreadable

No longer as common, since in RealLife, almost everybody[[note]]except certain industrial class backup systems[[/note]] has stopped using the old-fashioned 9-track mag tape reel because of size and cost. A 6250 bpi, 1600 foot tape could hold, at most, a little over 100 megabytes of data,[[note]]the normal maximum block size is 32760 bytes, and each 32760-byte block takes, with the gap following it, 5.992 inches[[/note]] and costs about US$12. By 2012, it was possible to walk into a stationery store and buy a microSD card the size of a man's thumbnail for close to $12, and it would hold at least 4 billion bytes, or about 50 times as much as the above tape reel. And that's not even the cheapest example. A top-of-the-line 4 terabyte[[note]]that's 4 ''trillion'' bytes[[/note]] hard drive could often be purchased at or under US$200. That means data storage on modern hardware is ''[[ReadingsAreOffTheScale thousands]]'' of times cheaper today, and that's before factoring in inflation.[[note]]It's impractical to use because of extremely slow random access, not because of low capacity and high cost. Most have moved on to modern tape cassette drives, which have a capacity of up to [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History 12 terabytes.]][[/note]]

*** On that note, the Famicom, the Japanese version of the UsefulNotes/NintendoEntertainmentSystem, had a tape recorder accessory that worked in tandem with the Famicom Keyboard to let one save and recall the programs they’ve written in Famicom BASIC onto tape. To load games from tape, however, required a third party device called a Fukutake Studybox. None of these devices left Japan.

*** On that note, the Famicom, the Japanese version of the UsefulNotes/NintendoEntertainmentSystem, had a tape recorder accessory that worked in tandem with the Famicom Keyboard to let one save and recall the programs they’ve written in Famicom BASIC onto tape. To load games from tape, however, required a third party device. None of these devices left Japan.

* NORAD in ''Film/Wargames'' has dozens of spinning tape drives and hard drive platters, which would be expected in the early '80s. But then an [[AIIsACrapshoot intelligent supercomputer named WOPR is installed]].
* In ''Film/WeirdScience'', Watt uses his home microcomputer to simulate a girl, but when he can't go further with it, Watt's friend Gary urges him to [[HollywoodHacking hack into a government mainframe to tap into its processing power]]. Several tape reels start spinning in the background as soon as he starts breaking in, and actually connecting to it brings a doll to life.

** At its premier, TOS was virtually an ''aversion'' of the trope: yes, they were tapes, but they were hand-held tapes (about the size of a deck of cards) that could store HUGE amounts of data and be accessed very quickly, which at the time was laughably far-fetched. It would be the equivalent of a standard magnetic platter hard-drive the size of a postage stamp that could store the entire internet. [[WordOfGod The creators]] have actually come out and said that they ''didn't'' want to expressly use tapes or "normal computer processing noises", but thought it would have been [[WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief been too unfamiliar and broken the glamor]].

* Magnetic tapes are the precursors of today's hard drive. Surprisingly, they ''are'' still used in the modern day, and new developments are still being made; as of December 2017, Ultrium LTO-8 tapes are available, storing 12TB of uncompressed data (30GB compressed, with an effective hardware compression ratio of 2.5:1). They're mainly stored in a backup location far from the main site of the source data, used as a long-lived backup and/or to replace data in case of a disaster. The reason is that magnetic tapes can be easily swapped quickly (since only the tape needs to be replaced) while hard drives cannot (unless the center pays for a hard drive that can, which can cost thousands). Also, when properly stored, in a dry and climate-controlled environment, magnetic tapes last for ''decades'', moreso than hard drives or [=CDs=].

Superseded by ComputerEqualsMonitor. It might seem weird though, but [[http://www.securitronlinux.com/bejiitaswrath/computer-tape-drives-coming-back-to-the-computers-of-2012/ the tape drive is not exactly extinct]] as a storage medium, and modern ones as of June 2018 can store up to 12 TB of data. Their niche today is generally backups for large multinational enterprises. Of course it's worth noting that they currently have no real technical advantage over hard drive backups, other than being compatible with older systems. As for appearing in film, most filmmakers give the modern drive a pass since modern LTO tape drives don't look anything like those tape drives of old and are so uncommon that not many people have seen one; the tapes look like small videocassettes (nothing like the big open-reel tapes that used to be common) and the drives mount in the same bays as CD/DVD drives. Not to mention that the lack of activity indicators on one and the inability to see the tape reels spinning, as well as the above-mentioned speed issue, makes it a very boring subject to film.