Some of you reading this may remember the.…ahem….joys of gaming on a tape-based system. Some of you will be reading this and wondering what the hell I’m talking about. But all throughout the ‘80s, so many of us ‘pressed play on tape’ to load up a game on our ZX Spectrums or Commodore 64s that it has become a cultural reference of sorts, even inspiring the name of a really cool band. Those tapes could hold a whopping 100kb of data on either side and in some countries, the game data was even broadcast over the radio for you to tape it live and play it later.
Now IBM and Fujifilm are developing a new kind of tape storage, capable of holding up to 220TB of data. That’s a lot of ZX Spectrum games or maybe about two prog-rock albums. And while I can’t see PC gamers giving up their super-speedy SSDs, the incredibly low cost of tape, combined with our penchant for unusual-looking storage devices (floppy disks come straight to mind) means that it may have a place on our desktops at some point. The technology won’t be ready for a few years yet however, so watch this space.