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This page will introduce you into each of the exhibits. To view the exhibits in detail, please click on the following image.
At the beginning of the development around 1971, U.S. Company 3M used usuall sound tapes for data storing purposes.
Obviously information technologics needed more space to store their data, so they have spent time in further development of these cassetts and reached a maximum capacity of 525 MB.
The exhibits shown in Picture 1 are of the capacities 45MB,150MB and 525MB.
Unfortunatly QIC cases were way to big in camparison to the actual tape size which made them very uncomfortable to use. Also the tape width was not big enough which ended up with the maximum capacity of 525MB.
Sure enough, more space was needed.
So lets walk over to the 1/2" tapes.
The technique to store data is the same as for the 1/4" tapes.
Besides that they are more robust and could be produced a little more efficient
Cleaning cassetts(picture 2 - middle) are used,guess what, for cleaning purposes. In detail they clean all pieces of the drives which have contact with magnetic tapes .
They are necessary because the drives are very vulnerable to any kind of dirt and dust.
To clean,you just put the cleaning cassette into the device and let it run for some minutes. The special Vlessart surface of the tape frees the drive parts from the dirt.
As the name may tell, a write protection ring protects the tape from accidently writing or deleting data. Such locks can also be found on floppy discs or sd cards.
The Robotron K5200 cassette drive is designed for recording and playing purposes. Its most common use nowadays is data capturing, data storage and usage as an input/output device. To see the drive in action, click on the following link: Video.
