Collection of obsolete technology and physical media formats
Welcome and let's explore my private collection of physical storage media and forgotten technologies.
I've been collecting these formats for some years, and this site is a visual and descriptive tribute to them.
Four sizes of magnetic tape cassettes from Sony:
- The NT is probably the smallest audio cassette format in the world. It's a digital magnetic tape cassette used for Sony NT-1 and later also NT-2 portable audio recorders. There were three versions of the cassette with different recording times: 60, 90 and 120 min.
- The micro cassette was mostly used as a standard medium for answering machines and voice recorders.
- The compact cassette is without discussion the best known and the longest really used tape audio format ever.
- Elcaset is one of the largest audio tape cassettes and maybe also therefore it was not very successful.
Cassette tapes were produced in four different versions, depending on the magnetic material used for the tape. This material defined the sound quality, required bias, and cost.
Type I / Ferric – also known as normal tape, was the first and simplest type. It offered lower sound quality at a lower cost and became the most common format for voice and music recording. The tape was made of iron oxide.
Type II / Chrome – the magnetic material used was either chromium dioxide or, more commonly, safer ferric-cobalt formulations. Compared to Type I, it provided better high-frequency response, lower noise, and less distortion.
Type III / Ferrichrome – this dual-layer tape (ferric + chrome) was intended to combine the strong bass of ferric tape with the clear highs of chrome tape. Production was complex and expensive, so it never gained significant market share and remained a short-lived experiment.
Type IV / Metal – made of pure metal particles (no oxide), this tape offered the best dynamic range and very low noise. Due to its high cost, it was mainly used by professionals and enthusiasts, delivering excellent, near-CD-quality recordings.
All optical discs, floppy disks and cartridges that were available for Nintendo gaming consoles. The heroes of all these games are Mario, Luigi and their friends.
- Nintendo NES cartridge (Super Mario Bros.)
- Nintendo Famicom Japan version (Super Mario Bros.)
- Nintendo Famicom floppy disks (Mario Golf)
- Super Nintendo (SNES) cartridge (Mario Paint)
- Super Nintendo (SNES) USA version cartridge (Super Mario All Stars)
- Nintendo Virtual Boy cartridge (Mario's Tennis)
- Nintendo 64 cartridge (Mario Kart 64)
- Nintendo 64 DD floppy disk (Mario Artist)
- Nintendo Wii optical disc (Super Mario Bros.Wii)
- Nintendo Wii U optical disc (Super Mario Bros.U)
- Nintendo GameCube optical disc (Dance Dance Revolution Mario)
- Nintendo DS card (Mario & Sonic at the Olympic games)
- Nintendo 3DS card (Super Mario 3D land)
- Nintendo Switch card (Super Mario Odyssey)
- Nintendo Game Boy cartridge (Super Mario Land)
- Nintendo Game Boy Color cartridge (Mario Tennis)
- Nintendo Game Boy Advance cartridge (Mario & Luigi RPG)
Hard disk packs and cartridges in different sizes:
- 14" Disk pack is a removable cartridge with hard disk drive platters used in 1960s and 1970s for storage in early IBM computers. This one has 5 hard disk platters and a capacity of 80 MB. The platters were hidden in the protective cover (the blue-transparent case).
- 14" Hard disk cartridge with a single platter and capacity usually from 1 to 5 MB. The case had only a small opening in the front for the magnetic head and it was not possible to remove platter from the protective case.
- 8" Hard disk cartridge is a smaller version of the previous one and offers more capacity (e.g. 25 MB)
- 5,25" and 3,5" HD cartridges were produced in 1980s and 1990s and offered significantly more storage space for data (hundreds of MB or even many GB). At the end of 90s e.g. Iomega JAZ or SyQuest SpartQ were very popular.
HDDs are electro-mechanical data storage devices that you probably have had or perhaps still have in your personal computer. They were introduced by IBM into their computing systems already in 1960s and are still produced today - though nowadays with significantly improved technology and vastly superior capacities.
There have been available in different form factors. In the photo you can see:
- 5,25" HDD
- 3,5" HDD
- 2,5" HDD
- 1,8" HDD
- 1" HDD
I am still missing the smallest HDD in the world: 0,85" drive from Toshiba, which was used e.g. in Nokia N91 mobile phone .
8-inch HDD Fujitsu M2344K from year 1993 with 690 MB capacity
vs
1-inch IBM Microdrive from year 2000 with 340 MB capacity (available in versions up to 16GB)
SONY Cassettes:
- D1D (SD1-1300LA) is possibly the largest magnetic tape cassette for data storage with dimensions 36.5 x 20.5 x 3.3 cm and a capacity of 100 GB on a 1330 m long tape.
- DDS (Digital Data Storage) is a compact cassette with size 7.3 x 5.3 x 1 cm and a native data capacity of 20 GB (gen. 4). I use it here for size comparison, because it's a well-known format.
- NT (also known as scoopman) is probably the smallest tape cassette in the world with approximate dimensions 3 x 2.1 x 0.5 cm. It was used for digital storage of audio tracks from voice dictation machines.
Some very small audio media formats from my collection. Aren't they cute?
- Bandai Micro Cartridge (endless-loop tape)
- Sony NT Cassette (digital magnetic tape)
- HitClips (memory card cartridge)
- Data Play (2-sided 22 mm optical disc)
- Miniphon Record (phonograph record for talking dolls)
Have you ever heard about self-destructive video formats that turn themselves into useless scrap after a certain time?
FlexPlay DVD is one of them. It's a fully compatible format with standard video DVDs, but once you remove it from its protective package, the inner bonding resin starts reacting with oxygen in the air and turns the disc unplayable within 48 hours.
2View VHS is a similar concept, but as its name suggests, it becomes unplayable after two views. The 2View cassette contains a mechanism that releases a spring with a magnet after two rewinds. This magnet erases all magnetic data stored on the tape.
These "no-return rental" concepts were not very successful. The 2View format, in particular, failed quickly after people came up with a very simple way to prevent their tapes from being erased.
Japan Victor Company (JVC) invented VHS video-cassette in 1976 and this format became a dominant home video format in 1980s and 1990s. First version of VHS offered only 240 lines of resolution, but JVC improved step-by-step this technology.
The latest inventions were high-resolution digital D-VHS and analog W-VHS (released only for Japanese market).
In the picture you can see:
- VHS: analog format with 240 lines
- S-VHS: analog format with 400 lines
- D-VHS: digital format with 720p or 1080i lines
- W-VHS: analog format with 720p or 1080i lines
- VHS-C: compact format of VHS
- S-VHS-C: compact format of S-VHS
- VHS-C to VHS motorized adapter
There were several attempts to store video on vinyl (PVC) media. This material was already well known from audio vinyl records, but recording a video signal together with audio on the same medium was far from trivial. It usually required extreme miniaturization of the grooves and styli.
- CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc) is a 12-inch disc stored in a protective caddy and has a capacity of 60 minutes of video per side.
- TED (Television Electronic Disc) is a single-sided, 8-inch flexible foil disc with a capacity of 10 minutes.
- VHD (Video High Density) is a 10-inch disc stored in a caddy similar to that of CED. It also provides 60 minutes of video per side.
- Vinyl Video is a 7-inch disc capable of playing only short, low-quality videos. In this case, however, a standard audio turntable can be used together with a special decoder.
Vinyl records and CDs were also used for releasing music singles. They usually contain only one song or multiple variations of the same song.
In my case you can see a collection of my favorite song by Erasure - Drama!
- 12" vinyl record
- 7" vinyl record
- 5" compat disc
- 3" compact disc
Who knows what my favorite album of all time is???
Yeah, it's Joyride by Roxette. I have the album on four formats: vinyl record, CD, DCC and compact cassette.
Unfortunately I am still missing MD version. Maybe on day...
Two of my favorite sci-fi movies from 70's and 80's:
- Blade Runner: limited red transparent LP soundtrack
- Silent Running: a great classical LP soundtrack with the unforgettable song "Rejoice in the Sun" by Joan Baez.
Edison was a pioneer of sound recording and reproduction. He founded the Edison Phonograph Company in 1888 and began the production of the first phonograph cylinders. The first mass-produced cylinders were made of brown wax. They wore out very quickly - often after being played only a few dozen times. Over time, the materials were improved: brown wax was replaced by hard black wax, which could withstand several hundred plays, and this was later replaced by Blue Amberol material.
- Edison Blank Record (1888 - 1906) - an unrecorded brown wax cylinder. Sound could be recorded directly using a phonograph, and after re-shaving the surface of the cylinder with an Edison Shaving Machine, it could be reused for recording multiple times.
- Edison Gold-Moulded Record (1902 - 1912) - a cylinder made of hard black wax, produced using a gold-coated master cylinder, with a playing time of about 2 minutes.
- Edison Amberol Record (1908 - 1912) - an improved technology with more grooves per inch and a playing time of approximately 4 minutes.
- Edison Blue Amberol Record (1912 - 1929) - offering the same playing time, but made of reinforced celluloid, which was significantly more durable.
- Edison Diamond Disc Record (1912 - 1929) - a 10-inch disc with approximately 5 minutes of playing time per side. Instead of the side-to-side movement used by modern records, these discs employed vertical (up-and-down) groove modulation and rotated at a speed of 80 RPM.
CD Video discs (CDV) are not Video CD discs. These formats are completely different.
CDV was a format launched by Philips at the end of 80s and combined CD and Laserdisc technology. CDVs were available in three sizes:
- 5" (12 cm) - combining digital audio (playable with standard CD player) and analogue video (with digital audio)
- 8" (20 cm) - mostly used for music video clips
- 12" (30 cm) - for music video clips and films
Beautiful rainbow-like optical effect on the surfaces of videodiscs. This effect appears on discs with very dense groove structures.
In the photo you can see three different types of videodiscs:
- optical Laserdisc (LD)
- mechanical Television Electronic Disc (TED)
- Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was one of the better Star Trek movies and it was released on many media formats, both analogue and later digital (DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray,...)
These are all pure analogue video formats:
- Video 8 (8 mm magnetic video tape)
- Betamax (1/2" magnetic video tape)
- VHS (1/2" magnetic video tape)
- Video2000 (3/4" magnetic video tape)
- Laserdisc (12" optical video disc)
- CED (12" capacitance video disc)
VHS is the only video format I really got in touch in my childhood. It's a magnetic tape, which won the media war against Beta (and Video2000 in Europe).
Optical discs began to replace magnetic tapes already at the end of 70s. There were many types of optical discs. The LaserDisc was one of the pioneers and it stored video in analogue form. All other discs (Video CD, UMD, DVD,...) offered digital video signal in quality adequate to the capacity of the media. High-definition videos were available on HD-DVD (already discontinued) or on Blu-Ray discs.
Two media formats with movie Battlestar Galactica from 1978. One very recent, the other one pretty old.
As an improvement of previous Video 8 format, the Super 8 was introduced by Kodak in 1965. It was primarily intended for amateur home video recordings, but many films were also released on this format.
Forty years later, nine technological giants (Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips,...) came to the market with optical discs called blu-ray discs offering high-resolution digital video storage.
Video High Density (VHD) was an analogue video disc format. It was popular especially in Japan around 1980s. It is very similar to CED (Capacitance Electronic Disk), but unlike CED, the diamond stylus doesn't follow the physical grooves on the disk, but the head is controlled electronically to be able to keep the track.
VHS tape (with the same movie - Der blaue Engel) is used here for size comparison.
That's the idea: a postcard for your relatives or friends with some nice tones. Rejoice your eyes and ears.
Three very obsolete audio storage media introduced already around the end of 19th century to the early 20th century:
- Piano roll is a roll of paper with perforations, played on automated piano players
- 2 minute phonograph cylinder is a black wax cylinder played in Edison's phonographs
- By recording wire was the audio signal stored magnetically on very thin steel wire
Obsolete storage media for data and programs, such as punched cards or punched tapes, were very popular in the 60s and 70s of the last century.
For comparison there is also a relatively modern USB stick with capacity of 64 GB, which represents approximately 860 millions punched cards!
3,5-inch is the most common size of magnetic floppy disks. Almost everybody knows the standard 1,44 MB diskette, but do you also know all the others?
- Single Sided / Double Density / 360 kB
- Double Sided / Double Density / 720 kB
- Double Sided / High Density / 1440 kB
- Double Sided / Extended Density / 2880 kB
- Floptical / 20 385 kB
- SuperDisk LS120 / 120 375 kB
The latest technology was SuperDisk. Its drive was backwards-compatible with 1.44 MB, 1.2 MB and 720 KB formats. Floptical drives were also backward-compatible with standard floppy disks.
3,5-inch floppy disk was also known as microfloppy. It was a very popular format of computer data storage and transfer for a very long time. Floppy disks are nowadays used only as a decoration and icon for saving data to files.
This photo contains probably all available and ever-released types.
Definitely the best-known was the 1.44 MB one. But there were also attempts to get 3.5-inch flexible magnetic disks to carry as much data as possible. This effort ended with the 240 MB SuperDisk. At that time there were already re-writable CDs (CD-R and CD-RW), and eventually ZIP disks with a format similar to microfloppies, but with capacities up to 750 MB.
Very unique were three attempts for data expansion: 21 MB Floptical, 144 MB UHD and 200 MB HiFD.
My (probably) complete collection of rare floppy disks under 3-inch:
- Quick Disk or Data Disk / 2,5" / 2 sides / 100 - 256 kB
- Data Disk PD-1 / 2" / 1 side / 1 MB
- Video Floppy / 2" / 1 side / 50 analogue tracks
- Compact Floppy Disk / 3" /2 sides / 360 and 720 kB
- MCD Cassette / 3" / 1 side / 150 kB
- Micro Disk / 2,6" / 1 and 2 sides / 8 and 16 kB
- Brother Micro Disc / 2,5" / 1 and 2 sides / unknown capacity
- Sharp Pocket Disk / 2,5" / 2 sides / 128 kB
- LT-1 / 2" / 2 dised / 796 kB
- Nintendo Famicom Disk / 2,8" / 2 sides / 112 kB
- Iomega Click! called also PocketZip / 2" / 1 side / 40 MB
- Olympia Micro Disk / 2,5" / 1 side / 8 kB
- Oliveti Minidisk / 2,5" / 1 side / 3 or 8 kB
In 1983 Iomega introduced a large-capacity disk called the Bernoulli Box. These 8" floppy disks with capacities 5, 10 and 20 MB were later replaced with 5,25" Bernoulli Box II disks with capacities from 20 up to 230 MB. These disks were produced until 1994.
That time, much more popular ZIP disks with capacity 100 MB and smaller size were introduced. Upcoming years Iomega improved ZIP disks and increased their capacities to 250 and even 750 MB.
In 1999, Iomega tried to succeed with small floppy disk called Clik! (later renamed to PocketZip) for portable devices. The disk had capacity of 40 MB.
Data storage media based on hybrid technology: magnetic recording and optical data reading.
The most standard sizes were:
- 130 mm (5,25 inch) MOD
- 90 mm (3,5 inch) MOD
- 64 mm Minidisc
Minidiscs were better known as audio formats for recording music and therefore were labeled with their capacities: 60, 74 or 80 minutes. For professional audio/data storage there were also 140 MB MD Data and later also 1 GB audio/data discs called Hi-MD.
12" Sony optical WORM disk (write once read many) with a capacity of 6.55 GB from late 1980s vs HI-MD magneto-optical WMRM disk (write many read many) with a capacity of 1 GB from 2005.
The size difference is really incredible.
Optical and magneto-optical writable discs in caddies. Some of them were recordable only once (WORM - write once read many), the others were re-writable.
The smallest of them is the DataPlay disc with 32 mm diameter and capacity of 500 MB. The largest one is 305 mm (12") WDM CLV disc with approximately 6,55 GB capacity (or 62 minutes of PAL video time).
What else can you see here: 12" LaserDrive, 5,25" UDO (Ultra High Density) Disc, 5,25" and 3,5" MO Discs, CD-R in caddy, Sony Proffesional Disc for data, DVD-RAM, PD (Phase-Change Dual) Disc, Data Discman Disc and different Minidiscs for data.
Minidisc is one of the most beautiful and very well developed formats for audio/data storage, but unfortunately it didn't gain enough popularity.
Here you can see all commercially available versions of audio and data Minidiscs:
- Pre-recorded Audio MD
- Blank 60 min Audio MD
- Blank 74 min Audio MD
- Blank 80 min Audio MD
- 140 MB MD DATA
- 650 MB MD DATA 2 (MD VIEW)
- 1 GB Hi-MD
Hi-MD was used also for audio and depending on used codec, available capacity ranged from from 1,5 to 34 hours.