That belongs in a museum!
"Whoa, whoa, what's this? Are you kidding me? Are we using tape reel computers? Noooo! Wait... are those slots for punched cards?"
In older movies and TV shows, made before the invention of the personal computer, all computers had large nine-track reel-to-reel magnetic tape drives, which were always moving back and forth. They usually had banks of blinking lights as well. Most viewers were left with the impression that the tape drive was the computer.
This was primarily done because the computer itself is very visually uninteresting when in operation. When a Tape Drive is operating, there is obviously something going on - just look at the spinning reels! (This was also, it must be remembered, the era before monitors and graphical user interfaces were common, so computational results generally had to come from a printout.)
No longer as common, since in Real Life, almost everybodynote 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 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 terabytenote hard drive could often be purchased at or under US$200.note That means data storage on modern hardware is thousands of times cheaper today, and that's before factoring in inflation.note
In modern works, this trope shows up only in period pieces set before approximately 1975, or when dealing with technology built before then. Interestingly, although the use of audio cassettes for data storage on home computers was quite common in the late 70s and early 80s, no one ever mistook a tape deck for a CPU box.
In the 1990s the films Clear and Present Danger and Eraser featured StorageTek PowderHorn robotic tape "silos".
Superseded by Computer Equals Monitor. It might seem weird, but 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, or up to 30 TB if hardware compression is employed. 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.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Kino's Journey: One country obviously has very highly advanced technology, but the computers there apparently still use tape drives.
Comic Books
- Superman:
- 1964 story arc The Untold Story of Argo City shows the super-advanced Kryptonian's computers use reel-like tape drives.
- 1960's storylines The Unknown Supergirl and The Girl with the X-Ray Mind introduce Lesla-Lar, a brilliant and mad Kryptonian scientist. She is capable of designing and building size-changing devices, memory-rewriting helmets and pocket teleporters. Her computers use tape drives.
- X-Men: In the original comic in the '60s, Cerebro had a tape drive.
Films — Live-Action
- In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, 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 much more advanced than they initially thought.
- Sidney Bliss' dating agency in Carry On Loving features a matchmaking computer that involves lots of flashing lights and spinning reels of tape, all of which looks quite high gloss for 1970. However, it's all purely decorative - the "computer" is Sophie, Sid's "wife" (they're not actually married), who hides in the room behind the computer and simply picks matches at random from the names they have on file.
- In the film Fail Safe a (for then) large mainframe computer is focused upon, complete with tape drives.
- In Iron Sky, 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 (the phone) not a computer. This (room-filling beast with blinky lights etc) is 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 run a space cruiser.
- Hidden Figures: The huge new IBM mainframe that NASA acquire to speed up their calculations; yes, the whole system really takes up an enormous room, and yes, we do see the reels moving. Punched cards, too.
- In The Italian Job (1969), 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.
- In Swordfish, the villain hides a computer virus in a university's old 1970s tape drive, as that's the last place the good guys would look for it.
- Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope had one of the Imperial brass on the Death Star mention that said superweapon's plans were stored on tapes. The opening does say that the series is set a long time ago.
- Cue Irregular Webcomic!:
Darth Vader: We have the ability to destroy a planet and tape is the best backup medium we have?
- In Rogue One we get to see said tapes, along with many others at the Imperial data center on Scarif. Makes one wonder whether it's an accident the storage units look so much like VHS boxes.
- Cue
- NORAD in Wargames has dozens of spinning tape drives and hard drive platters, which would be expected in the early '80s. But then an intelligent supercomputer named WOPR is installed.
- In Weird Science, also set in the '80s, Wyatt uses his home microcomputer to simulate a girl, but when he can't go further with it, Wyatt's friend Gary urges him to 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.
Literature
- Isaac Asimov
- "Point of View": When the story was published in Boys Life, it was accompanied by an illustration of the heads of Roger and Atkins floating in front of circuit boards and a tapedrive.
- "Profession": The information gained from Neural Implanting in The Future is stored on tapes. The protagonist figures out that someone has to write the program in the first place, meaning that whoever created the computer tape doesn't learn things through the computer.
- "Someday":
- In this story, Niccolo's Bard and Paul's book both use magnetic tape to store information.
- In the art drawn for Infinity Science Fiction (and reused for the audiobook cover), the mechanical Bard is shown to look like the classic computer tape drive.
- Robert Westall's Futuretrack Five: Not quite the reel-to-reel, obviously spinning tape drives of the pre-701s computers, but datatapes is the term applied to portable computer data.
Live-Action TV
- Averted in A for Andromeda (written by astronomer Fred Hoyle who used computers in his work). The protagonist has to destroy all the components of the Master Computer to be sure it won't be rebuilt.
- 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.
- Doctor Who in the 1960s, of course, although some episodes set in the future eschew the tape drives for more blinking lights. An egregious example in the First Doctor serial The War Machines: WOTAN, the Master Computer, is 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.
- Graeme's computer in The Goodies 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. (hits it with a mallet)
- I Dream of Jeannie: The giant, billion-dollar, brand new NASA computer in "The Girl Who Never Had A Birthday".
- In 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 mostly isolated from the outside world, so the tape drives (and monochromatic text-prompt computer interface) are completely era-appropriate.
- In The Man in the High Castle, the Nazis have tape drives with swastikas on them.
- Out of this World (1962): "Little Lost Robot": The gallery, from where the characters conduct the experiment, has tape reels, buttons and levers, as well as whirring and flashing lights, which shows how complicated the machinery is in Hyperbase 7.
- Star Trek: The Original Series 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. 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 been too unfamiliar and broken the glamor.
- From 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.
- UFO (1970): In this Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series, a montage of flashing lights, spinning tape drives, blocky letters on coloured monitors, swaying female buttocks, and rows of large luminous buttons accompany every Red Alert.
- Wonder Woman (1975): I.R.A.C., the computer so smart that it knew Wonder Woman's secret identity and protected it, was shown frequently with spinning tape machines, the movement and sound of which indicated the computer processing some problem
Music
- The music video for the song "Computer Games" by New Wave group Mi-Sex was filmed on location at what was then Control Data Corp's North Sydney processing centre. In 1979. It does overlap with Computer Equals Monitor though.
Pinball
Video Games
- The memory banks from the videogame Evil Genius are big mainframes with a nine-track tape drive, which makes sense since the game is a 1960's Diabolical Mastermind simulator. Those items are a;sp 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).
- Ultima III: It is revealed that Big Bad Exodus is a computer. Evidently an older one too, as it is defeated when the player inserts a series of punch cards.
- Team Fortress 2 takes place in Retro Universe version of the 60s and 70s where reel-to-reel computer banks abound in many maps, especially inaccessible background rooms. The Spy's Red-Tape Recorder, an unlockable replacement for the Electro-Sapper, is a played with example; it has reels, but it's not clear if they serve a practical purpose or are just to "disguise" it as a tape-recorder.
- Kaos, a major antagonist in Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!, is a robot with a tape drive prominently featured in his design.
- The computers in Fallout are often found with tape drives. In Fallout 2, these are described as being very modern reel-to-reel devices. Justified, given the slightly twisted alternate history the games exist in (e.g., the transistor was never invented in the Falloutverse; the background went right on with a 1950s-esque vision of the future for more than a century, right up until the bombs fell).
- The Black Mesa facility in Half-Life apparently still uses these in some areas. Seeing as many areas are converted Cold War-era missile silos and bunkers, it's possible some of the outdated equipment hasn't been replaced.
- Human computers in The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. Since it's set in 1962, totally justified. The game disc artwork is even printed to look like a reel of cold-war era computer tape
- Despite its future setting, the Vandenberg labs in Deus Ex have a few tape decks running. Apparently they're capable of managing a Universal Constructor.
- The computers in BioShock 2's "Minerva's Den" DLC feature visible, spinning tape drives like any computer from the period. Odder is the fact that the computer in question is able to dump its core data onto a device small enough for Dr. Tenenbaum to keep on her person.
- In the first mission in Jazz Punk, you run into a Fem Bot prostitute who has tape reels for breasts. The game doesn't take itself particularly seriously, if you hadn't guessed.
- Wolfenstein: The New Order zig-zags this; the game is set in an Alternate Universe where Nazi Germany won World War II thanks to super-science provided by the Big Bad 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 punch cards.
- Call of Duty: Black Ops features them, given its '60s setting. Memorably, one is used in the fourth mission as the basis for a Quick Time Event right before the shooting starts, wherein you sneak up on an unsuspecting guard and smash his head into the tape reel.
- Control includes them because the Oldest House doesn't get along with technology post-1985 or so. Reel-to-reel players are found in numerous locations holding audio logs to add to your media collection.
Webcomics
- In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, not only does the Yoyodyne-built computer in the Generictown University Science Department have a tape drive (to be fair, the Dean's personal computer is a TRS-80), but so does a random gizmo on the alien planet of Butane.
Web Videos
- Lampshaded in Freeman's Mind when Gordon enters an old but still in-use rocket test site. Despite being under attack from an Eldritch Abomination, it is the sight of a tape drive (and punch cards; see the page quote) that sends him to a raging rant.
Western Animation
- In DuckTales (1987), Glomgold's computer in "Wrong way to Ronguay" is of this type.
- Played with in Megas XLR in the episode "Viva Las Megas", which features R.E.C.R, a giant military robot built in the 60's. It has a tape reel and a "massive" 56-kilobyte processor; Coop taunts it by telling it he's got ten-year-old video games that are more technologically advanced than it is.
- In The Venture Brothers, the computer system that stores the minds of the Venture brothers is apparently run on tape.
- In another episode, malevolent supercomputer M.U.T.H.eR. is on a reel-to-reel mainframe. Lampshaded when M.U.T.H.eR. tries to launch a nuclear missile; while everyone else is panicking, Pete White mentions that a computer that runs on such an ancient mainframe (and uses a dial-up modem) can't act very quickly.
- In one of the numerous SpongeBob SquarePants TV specials, the Atlanteans have a giant machine which can shrink people down to the size of viruses, and everyone's data gets stored on a magnetic tape drive.
- A first season episode of the Super Friends featured the G.E.E.C., a computer that could replace all the world's laborers. It filled many rooms and sported several reel-to-reel tape drives.
- In one episode of Futurama, Bender hangs a pinup of a tape deck computer. Fry approves.
- Fry had just hung a pinup of a girl in a bikini. The large round tape reels in Bender's picture have just the right placement to invite comparison to certain large round objects in Fry's picture.
Real Life
- 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 (30TB 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. It should be noted, however, that these modern tapes look absolutely nothing like the reel-to-reel tapes of yesteryear. In particular you can't see the reels or magnetic strip without disassembling them.
- In the 8-bit Era of home computers Examples software was available on cassette tapes, which were the exact same format as the Compact Cassettes. In fact, certain systems Examples 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!).note If you did your own programming you could record to them as well, making them the exact precursor to home use floppy drives. While North American users quickly moved on to faster floppy drives, cassettes remained the main data storage medium on 8-bit computers in Europe until they were superseded by more powerful machines because floppy drives were too expensive.
- BASICODE was developed specifically to unify the multiple BASIC implementations in order to broadcast computer code over the radio. By recording a tape and loading it into your computer through an interpreter, you'd essentially downloaded a program using the radio.
- The Famicom, the Japanese version of the Nintendo Entertainment System, has a tape recorder accessory that works 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 Wrecking Crew) even use 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, requires a third party device called a Fukutake Studybox. None of these devices left Japan.
- 8-track computers were computers built around a mono 8track drive. These computers took advantage of the, well, eight tracks and would switch from one track to other as part of the flow chart of the operation, allowing a weak processor (even for the era) to have a much more streamlined user experience. Typically, these were installed in board games and other home gadgets.
- BASICODE
- Donald E. Knuth's seminal Art of Computer Programming includes how to best sort data on one or two tape drives, and whether the tape can be read backwards or not. First published in 1973 when tape drives were much more common.
