Editor's note: "Tape" was the originator of Apple's classic computer product ipod from 1980s to 1990s! This article aims to let readers after 00 know about this legendary invention, let friends after 90 learn to be old, and let friends after 80 learn to be old!

There is a sentence in the book "The Battle of Seven Seas": "More and more hair falls off the pillow, and the favorite bread with vegetables disappears from the convenience store. The accumulation of these tiny despairs will make people grow. -The pan-theme "Childhood Collapse" invites readers to re-examine the products of childhood, so that your childhood will continue to collapse.

Have you seen anything cool down there? For older readers, it is full of youthful memories. But for young readers, they may not have seen it at all.

Knowing tapes has become a problem of revealing a person's age. Pixabay's name is "magnetic tape", which can be used to record all kinds of information. 1980 ~ 1990 is its golden age. From music, movies to computer data, magnetic tapes are used as storage media. Major technology companies have also designed many classic audio-visual players for tapes, such as the famous Sony Walkman Walkman Walkman. However, with the rapid development of MP3 and other storage media, magnetic tape is gradually eliminated by the market, which makes many people think that it has entered history like BB call. But in fact, magnetic tape has not disappeared, and even revived in professional fields, becoming an important storage tool that many high-tech companies and scientific research units rely on. Next, let's look at the past lives of the tape!

The working principle of magnetic tape Before we talk about the history of magnetic tape, we must first understand the working principle behind it.

Magnetic tape is a way of magnetic storage, so what is magnetic storage? Simply put, it is the technology of storing data on magnetic media.

The principle behind magnetic storage is electromagnetic induction and current magnetic effect. Electromagnetic induction means that the change of magnetic field will produce the "magnetoelectric" effect of current; Current magnetic effect is the "electromagnetic" effect of magnetic field caused by current change. These two effects make scientists have a new idea about data recording: since electricity can generate magnetism and magnetism can also generate electricity, can't we store and output data by converting electrical signals into magnetic fields and recording them on magnetic materials and then converting these recorded magnetic fields into return signals? And this idea is the basic principle of magnetic storage.

When we want to write information, the current generated by the signal will make the electromagnet of the recording head generate a magnetic field, which will change the arrangement of magnetic powder on the magnetic tape and record the information in the form of magnetic field arrangement. When reading, according to the magnetic field generated by the magnetic powder device, the information can be read by the reverse current generated by the playback head.

How magnetic tape works. . History of magnetic tape recording process 1888, American engineer Oberlin Smith published an article, he thought that a phonograph with magnetic storage could be designed by applying the principles of electromagnetic induction and current magnetic effect, but Smith did not put his idea into practice. According to Smith's article, Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen successfully designed the first phonograph with magnetic memory in 1898, but he replaced the magnetic tape with thin steel wire.

The magnetic phonograph designed by Valdemar Poulsen is now kept in the Danish Museum of Science and Technology. Paulson's invention is a major breakthrough in magnetic storage technology, but people soon found that recording sound with thin steel wire is not efficient and easy to store, so many scientists devoted themselves to research and improvement. At that time, most scientists focused on the improvement of thin steel wire, while German engineer Fritz Froehmer took a different approach. Pfleumer thinks that since the magnetic field is to be recorded, it is theoretically effective to wrap the thin steel wire with paper tape with magnetic powder, and it is convenient to manufacture and store. Subsequent experiments confirmed his idea. So in 1928, Pfleumer designed the world's first tape recorder.

Fritz Froehmer and the tape recorder he designed. 1935, AEG company of Germany was authorized by Pfahler Moer to start mass production of magnetic tape recorder-magophon. But Magophon is not only expensive, but also difficult to operate, so it is only used by the military. However, after World War II, with the increasing use of audio tapes around the world, more and more companies began to develop better tape recorders.

1958, RCA company of the United States developed the first cassette recording tape, which was protected by plastic shell and designed to be reversible. The recording time and quality of this product are similar to those of the later cassette tapes, but it has not been successful in the market because of its large size. However, audio tapes have become an important reference index for product development of other companies.

1962, Philips invented a compressed magnetic tape called "cassette tape", which was used in the European market the following year. At that time, there were many formats of audio tapes circulating in the market, and in order to seize the market, Philips Company disclosed the patent and format of cassette tapes in 1964, allowing all manufacturers to use them free of charge. This move really made Philips cassette tapes become the mainstream of the market, and its main competitor, Sony of Japan, had to give up its own tape development plan.

Box (left) and RCA box (right). After cassette tape became the mainstream of the market, it was quickly used to play pop music, and various companies actively introduced better music players. Sony didn't develop its own tapes, but in 1979, they launched the world's first cassette player-the walkman. The emergence of the walkman pushed the cassette to the peak, and Sony also made a lot of money from the cassette and the walkman.

Sony Walkman Walkman Walkman However, as the saying goes, "it flourishes and declines". With the appearance of CD and MP3 formats in1990s, cassette tapes and players were gradually replaced by CD and CD players. In 200 1 year, Apple introduced the iPod MP3 Walkman, which established the leading position of the Walkman. Since then, cassette tapes have gradually faded out of public life. Although the cassette has indeed retired from the historical stage, it has not disappeared. In other fields, the tape is still shining!

Life of magnetic tape-Data magnetic tape Although magnetic tape was developed for recording sound, it can also record computer data. 195 1 year, magnetic tape was first used to record computer data. Although the tape used at that time was very large and could record very little information, its potential was still seen by the technology giant IBM. With the continuous improvement of IBM's magnetic tape, computer magnetic tape (or data magnetic tape) has successfully entered the commercial market since the 1970s. Its size and price are not only affordable for ordinary families, but also become the standard equipment for personal computers to store data.

However, with the rapid development of optical disks and hard disks, data tapes gradually faded out of the computer data storage field after 2000. Just when many people think that the data tape is going to quit the historical stage like a cassette, it has taken a brand-new path.

When it comes to the storage of computer data, we always think of hard disks and solid-state disks first. After all, you and I are both using it now. How did the tape return to this field? This is due to the tape protocol-Linear Tape Open (LTO) jointly formulated by IBM, HP and Seagate in 1997. LTO is just a tape technology jointly developed by three companies to improve the performance of tape. Like Apple's ios system, LTO releases new versions regularly. At present, the latest LTO-9 data tape has the same data reading and writing ability as the hard disk, and the storage capacity reaches 18 TB (if the data is compressed, the capacity can reach 45 TB). In addition, compared with hard disk and solid state disk, data tape has the following three advantages in data storage:

LTO-2 data tape. These advantages make technology companies (such as Facebook and Google) and scientific research institutions (CERN and NASA) with massive data, and even institutions with high requirements for data security (such as banks and national archives) choose to use tape to store data.

20 1 1, Gmail, Google Mail, accidentally deleted emails from more than 40,000 accounts due to an updated Bug. Although Google has been storing copies of data on hard disks in multiple data centers, some data cannot be recovered. Fortunately, these data have been backed up to data tapes before recovery.

Seeing this, it is estimated that some readers already want to start with an 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.

The tape sounds great. Want to get started quickly? Soo Ji Dan Le, things are not as simple as you think! Giphy, first of all, tape is much cheaper than hard disk, but tape drive is not cheap. Tape drives cost 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. Surely you wouldn't set such an environment for tapes. Therefore, the advantages of data tape are placed on the needs of the general public, but they have become disadvantages. Therefore, the general data storage, hard disk and solid-state hard disk still put the tape on the ground. But it's not that the tape is not advanced, but that it's advanced enough for our wallets.

The price of LTO tape drives, in US dollars. With the rapid development of the network, the amount of data generated by the network is getting higher and higher. According to the data of International Data Information Corporation, the data of the network is growing at a rate of 30%-40% every year, but the growth rate of hard disk capacity is less than half of this rate at present. The storage capacity of data tape is increasing at a rate of 33% every year, and there is no sign of slowing down. At the same time, with the development of tape drive, the reading and writing speed of data tape is no longer lower than that of solid state disk. So many people think that tape is likely to be the first choice for storing big data in the future.

Some technologies and inventions disappear from our daily life, often because they are behind the times. But the example of tape tells us that after it disappeared from our life, it became more advanced in the field of data storage. As a part of my childhood memories, tape has not only not been eliminated by the times, but also shines in the professional field, which makes me feel gratified.

Of course, there are not only tapes, but also CDs that are gradually forgotten. Maybe there will be a major technological breakthrough in the future, and it is not impossible for it to fight back and dominate the data storage industry again!

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