Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "Digital audio needed videotape to be possible - and the early days were wild!" video.

  1. Exabyte was founded to record digital data on videotape for backup in 1985. They went fairly rapidly to 8mm video cartridges, as opposed to full size VHS, in 1987 (dates according to Wikipedia). The 8mm format had been introduced in 1984. DAT tapes were a similar if slightly smaller format, and indeed Exabyte bought my company, R-Byte, which made a DAT tape drive, in 1992. None of that occurred in a vacuum. QIC tape drives were introduced by 3m in 1972 (again Wikipedia), and although they didn't store Exabyte level densities, they were from 20mb to 400mb in later versions. So video tape as data storage had a competitor. Tape storage, going back into the open reel computer days, was generally used as computer backup on bigger machines and didn't come to PCs until the QIC days. Writable CDs were supposed to take over as a backup medium, but what actually happened is disc drives became so cheap for unit of storage that it made more sense to just purchase more drives and use them as backup, hence NAS or network attached storage and data vaults. Now, companies are just as likely to ship backup data to cloud companies.
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