Early Access - RCA Sound Tape (Patreon)

Making this video has been a marathon. It started back when I bought a RCA Cartridge well over a year ago. I then finally sourced a player for the tape.... but that got lost in the post. I got hold of some used cartridges and finally managed to buy another machine that was broken. Hopefully you'll think it's worth the effort in the end. 

There's one thing I didn't mention in the video because it didn't fit anywhere...but it's been going around my head all the time. I find it interesting how the word Cartridge is now understood to be something that contains games while cassettes are something that have tape in them. 

So there's video cassette and compact cassette which are now usually just called tapes... or K7 in some countries (one of my favourite nicknames for a product - if you don't understand why,  pronounce it in French). Then on the other side there are all the game system cartridges from Nintendo, Atari, Sega etc. 

The RCA sound tape looks like a giant cassette but it was called a cart, just like the  8-track. 

Earl Muntz used to capitalise the spelling of his 4-track system as 'CARtridges' and magazines used this way of writing the word for a while when talking about all cartridge systems.

When Philips introduced their compact cassette they chose not to use the term compact cartridge - perhaps it's a Europe thing preferring to use a term that refers to a small box rather than something you put in a gun. Japan were big supporters of the cassette - and when JVC came out with VHS and Sony introduced Betamax they were both referred to as video cassettes rather than video cartridges. 

I find it interesting to see how the use and understanding of the meaning of a word can change so much in such a short time. A cartridge is now a solid state device whereas a cassette contains tape. 

One other thing that I was wondering about was how much of an impact the lack of licensing fees for using cassettes had in the widespread adoption of the Philips tech. Sony pretty much forced Philips to drop any  licensing fees in return for them supporting the format. 

Since anyone and everyone could make a cassette machine (and tapes) without having to pay fees, this must have been a big incentive for all these unconnected companies to work at making the tech succeed. Effectively it was a massive open-source collaborative project between many the best electronic companies in the world.  So what started off as a dictation system in the early 1960s was developed into an impressively high quality music format by the 1990s.

I just wonder how much Philips made out of it all?