Cassette

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Cassette Mean?

A cassette is a storage medium consisting of magnetic tape spooled within a cartridge enclosure. Cassettes can store different types of media, including audio and video. The standalone term “cassette” is most often a casual word for audio cassette, whereas the video format is typically referred to as “VHS (Video Home System) cassette.” Early personal computers also used cassettes for reading and writing data.

Techopedia Explains Cassette

Audio cassettes can be traced back to the early 1960s and videocassettes can be traced back to the early 1970s. Audio cassettes were originally manufactured by the Phillips Company as children’s toys, but their gradual escalation in recording and playback quality distinguished them as a major consumer audio format by the 1980s. VHS tapes were first introduced by the Japanese electronics company, JVC, and also came to prominence in the 1980s.

Both formats were based on reel-to-reel tape mechanisms, which spooled plastic tape that was impressed with electromagnetic impulses. These impressions were then read and transduced into audio and/or visual data through elaborate reading and playback systems. Cassettes basically consolidated this process into smaller packaging, which set an important precedent for portable media over the following decades.

Some personal computers also used to use cassettes for magnetic tape data storage. An example of this was the Commodore Datasette, which interfaced with the Commodore 1530 series personal computers.

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.