4 ms·

Kinda wish they would pack this technology into a consumer version in Compact Cassette format.

• myself248 3y ago
  I wonder what the world would look like if the Pereos tape drive had caught on and then been steadily improved. It was doing 1GB/tape (500MB/side) in 1994, on a tape that perches cozily on a fingertip, and theoretically should've been easy enough to build into all sorts of consumer electronics. Sony made digital cameras that recorded to floppy disk (the Digital Magnetic Video Camera, or MaViCa), and Agfa made one that recorded to PocketZip, the 40MB shrink of Zip disks. Both random-access media, but that isn't crucial for a digital camera. Could easily record to linear media, and in fact a later Digital Mavica did just that, onto CD-R discs. So recording to tape wouldn't be a stretch at all. Instead of deleting photos on the camera, you could perhaps mark them for deletion but then have that take effect at offload time. Then blank the tape and use it again. At a time when 64MB flash cards were barely affordable, a 500MB tape would've been a gamechanger. I use cameras as an example because they're probably the use-case that benefits most from a capacious writable medium in a portable format.