Computer Equals Tapedrive: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
[[File:IBM 2401 tape drives at the Computer History Museum.jpg|thumb]]
In older movies and TV shows, made before the invention of the personal computer, all computers had large nine-track reel-to-reel magnetic tape drives, which were always moving back and forth. They usually had banks of blinking lights as well. Most viewers were left with the impression that the tape drive ''was'' the computer.
This was primarily done because the computer itself is very visually uninteresting when in operation. [[Rule of Perception|When a Tape Drive is operating, there is obviously something going on.]]
No longer as common, since in [[Real Life]], almost everybody has stopped using the old-fashioned 9-track mag tape reel because of size and cost, e.g. a 6250 bpi, 1600 foot tape could hold, at most, about 75 megabytes of data, and costs about US$12. By 2012, it was possible to walk into a stationery store and buy a microSD card the size of a man's thumbnail for close to $12, and it would hold at least 4 billion bytes, or about 50 times as much as the above tape reel. And that's not even the cheapest example. A
In modern works, this trope shows up only in period pieces set before approximately 1975, or when dealing with technology built before then. Otherwise, expect this to show up in works with [[Schizo-Tech]], [[Retraux]], or with themes of a [[Retro Future]]
Superseded by [[Computer Equals Monitor]], since modern LTO tape drives don't look anything like those tape drives of old and are so uncommon that not many people have seen one. Not to mention that the lack of activity indicators on one and the inability to see the tape reels spinning makes it a very boring subject to film.
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