In the original series of Star Trek tapes are used for data storage. Tapes are somewhat archaic in 2015, let alone the 23rd century. They are only really of much use for archival, due to access times measured in minutes. Yet they seem to be Starfleet's main storage medium.
Are there explanations for this, both in universe and in real life? Hard drives were invented in the 1950s and were not uncommon by the mid 60s.
Like most of Star Trek's technology, we never really get an explanation for how it evolved, only technobabble for how it works. However, it's important to note that we don't actually know what technology those "tapes" use. Yes, they are physical cartridge-like objects that get put into a slot to access their data.
But that description also describes flash memory cards, removable SSD hard drives, etc:
The use of a portable device for holding offline data, that is "loaded" into a computer on demand, is a pretty universal concept. This would be particularly useful if your vessel spends a lot of time at faster-than-light speeds. Cloud computing would be right out.
The "tapes" allow the Starfleet personnel to record data in one place and move it somewhere else, accessing it only when needed, which would:
Of course, thought we do see some usage of cassettes in TNG, it's much more rare. Instead, the computer is often instructed to "load" a certain program. This could mean that the tape concept still exists, but it's now a centrally-located tape rack, which the computer can load from at random. Or, it's possible that information density has gotten so high that the need for offline storage is gone, and their hand-held devices have replaced them.
Words change their meaning over time.
For example, I guess or deduce that the original meaning of the word yet was "now", "at the present time". And from that meaning the opposite secondary meanings of "still" and "already" developed.
When I was child I thought that yet only meant already, as in "Are we there yet?".
But that doesn't seem to make sense in the song "Bendemeer's stream".
the line:
I think: "Is the nightingale singing there yet?"
probably does not mean he is wondering if the nightengale has already arrived and started singing. Instead it probably means he wonders if the nightingale is still singing there.
The storytelling logic of the song tells me that in "Bendemeer's stream" "yet" means "still", the exact opposite to "already", the meaning I am much more familiar with. And thus from that one line in a song I deduce that "yet" probably originally meant "now".
On 19th century paddlewheel steamers a wooden platform bridged the gap between the tops of the two semicircular wheelhouses and was used to command the ship from. After decades of commanding and steering paddlewheel ships from their bridges, the command platform on propeller steamships continued to be called the bridge, and so on until the 24th century starships and beyond.
The writers of TOS may have imagined that computer tapes would still be used in the era of Star Trek and so called the small transportable data storage units "tapes", but with our modern knowledge of more advanced computer data storage, we can imagine that in the alternate universe of Star Trek which branched off from ours before World War II, small transportable computer data storage units are still called "tapes" for the same reasons that the command center of a starship is still called the "bridge".
And here is a link to a similar question.
Why does the Star Wars universe use such a primitive technology as data-tapes?1
The "tapes" we see in TOS show no sign of actually physically being tapes. They look a lot more like solid-state storage of some kind (the props look like simple rectangles of lucite or similar):
(From Memory Alpha)
(From pacific201.com)
(From leaningstewards.org)
It could easily be that at some point they had extremely high-speed, high-density tapes for much the reason we still have tapes today (durability, capacity), the term became common again, and then they got replaced by a new form of solid-state storage but the term was entrenched.
Being in the northern half of my 40s, I said the other day having heard a new band "That's pretty good, I might get the album." (ouch)
Magnetic tape has the longest average shelf life (10~20 years) of any existing and still in use storage medium. It also offers the highest sequential read/write speeds of any type of storage and can perform reading and writing simultaneously. IMO the burden of proof lies on you, why wouldn't we still be using tapes?
Magnetic tape data storage –Wiki (Richard's link)
Viability: (edited for brevity; missing some citations)
At any single moment in time each T10000C tape drive can read or write (or both read and write) to one tape cartridge which can contain up to 5TB of uncompressed data. Real-world sequential data transfer speeds are high (sustained 240MB/second for the T10000C and 160MB/second for the TS1130) compared to disk.
The smallest SL8500 library holds up to 1,448 tape cartridges, for 1.4 Petabytes of online uncompressed storage. An equivalent amount of PC-class hard disk storage would be priced at $100,000 or less for the drives. The tape library would likely deliver a higher sustained sequential write speed, the media would be more rugged (for off-site storage), the media would meet or exceed long-term archival storage requirements (for reliable retrieval decades into the future), and the data center power and cooling requirements would be considerably lower. The economics of this comparison are more complicated than a single-spindle versus tape drive comparison.
Data storage lifespans –storagecraft.com
Magnetic data and cassette tapes: 10-20 years
Nintendo Cartridge: up to 10 years
Floppy Disk: 10-20 years
CDs and DVDs: 5-10 unrecorded 2-5 recorded
Blu-Ray: Not certain, probably over 2-5 recorded
M-Disc: 1,000 years (theoretically)
Hard Disk: 3-5 years
Flash Storage: Depends on write cycles, 5-10 years or more
If we conservatively assume that all of the Enterprise's sensor data is collected at 1GB per second, that's ~31 petabytes per standard year. For that we'd need about 50 million (650MB) CD-ROMs (or ~6M BRDs) compared to ~21 SL8500's (~30k tapes) and remember, that's the smallest one we have today.
Actually they used tape as in motion picture film. The writers/props people come up with a lot of new tech, but in other cases they just punted and used what was prevalant for the day.
