[jgrahamc]

Why? They only look slow and difficult looking backwards.

If you'd lived through the use of them you'd know that it was incredibly cool to be able to save multiple programs on a small, portable medium and just find the program you are looking for by fast forwarding to the right position on the tape based on the counter.

Also, tape was incredibly easy to get because it was the same stuff you used to record music. It was not hard to obtain; any music shop or even stationer had it.

And it turns out it was very robust: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/in-which-i-switch-on-30-year-old...

[tluyben2]

Yep; tape was the cheapest, easiest thing there was. You didn't have to buy any extra stuff. Like sd cards are now for music/pics/vids/computers. It was slow but I had fun.

Waiting for things also makes it more special/valuable; instant gratification is definitely not what it's cracked up to be in most cases; buying games is definitely one of those things. When I buy some instant games for my Android devices is one of them; they appear instantly, you try them and discard mostly. When you have to wait 15 min and have a good chance your computer will crash during the ordeal so you'll have to wait another 15 min you'll feel it has more value for your money for some reason. You would play games which suck for weeks/months because they take effort to load and get going. Not sure if that's different now with Linux; when you cannot get something going because you have to build it and ./configure; make; make install has errors; if, after a week of messing around, you get it going, you'll bloody play/use it, no matter what it turns out to be.

[freehunter]

Well SD cards these days are kind of a replacement for cassettes. Cameras use them, camcorders use them, phones use them, computers use them, tablets use them, some cards can use them. An SD card isn't limited to one device, similar to how a cassette found its home in the recording studio, the car, the home, and the computer.

[tluyben2]

Yep, that was my point :)

[freehunter]

Ah, I guess I misunderstood. Apologies.

[inoop]

Also, you can broadcast programs over normal FM radio and have people record it on their cassette players.

[larrys]

"stationer" - place to buy office supplies before Staples/OfficeMax/OfficeDepot.

And who would every think back then that one day you would able to buy supplies for computers in the same place you had prescriptions filled?

I remember very distinctly how cool it was to work on a CRT at the computer center (they had ditched the teletypes a few years before). You could sit there for hours on end and still have a good time with a green cursor on a VT100 with no windowing. And in the next room was the mainframes which you could see from practically any seat (Wharton Computer Center, Vance Hall)