Have you ever wondered how a whole album of your favorite music got onto one of those little cassette tapes? Or, what about computer floppy disks; have you ever wondered how they can hold 180 or more pages of typed text? The answer to both of these questions is magnetic recordingMagnetic recording devices seldom get much attention until they fail to work. But without magnetic recording, recording your favorite television show on a video cassette recorder would be impossible, portable tape players wouldn't exist, and you wouldn't be able to get money from an automated bank teller machine at two o'clock in the morning.
Now what about the Navy? Could it operate without magnetic recording? The answer is definitely no. Without it:
- Computer programs and data would have to be stored on either paper cards or on rolls of paper tape. Both of these methods need a lot of storage space, and they take much longer to load into and out of the computer.
- There wouldn't be any movies to show or music to play on the ship's entertainment system when the ship is at sea and is out of range for television and radio reception.
- Intelligence-collection missions would be impossible since you couldn't store the collected signals for later analysis.
As you can see, magnetic recording plays a very important part both in our Navy life and in our civilian life.
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