This might be the reason cassette players never went out of production:

It’s the magnetic head from this credit card reader:

Also, take a look at this video:

This, or this sort of thing, definitely appears possible. Here’s a similar explainer.

Since technologically, cassette tape and credit card magnetic strips are basically the same thing, they shared much of the same factory tooling. Here, in a really great article on the National Audio Company, is the story of a cassette tape manufacturing line adapted to credit card magnetic strips—and then back into a cassette tape line when NAC got into the actual tape-making business few years ago:

Stepp [president of NAC] estimates that tape hadn’t been made in the United States since 1984 at the latest, so they had to scour the country for a machine able to be reconditioned back into making tape. What they found somewhere out in Nevada was a 62-foot long, 20-ton tape-coating line originally built in the 1980s that had most recently been converted into a machine for making credit card strips. They had to haul it in “across the Great Plains during a blizzard” Stepp says, and then take it apart in pieces to move it up their antiquated freight elevators, breaking one in the process. The restoration and reconditioning process took over a year-and-a-half to undergo, mostly done by people Stepp enlisted from around the country who had retired from the industry decades ago.

That article also includes this bit. In other words, we came close to losing the ability to actually manufacture cassette tape at all:

“My son and I sat down together and we said we’ve got to either get out of business within three years or we’ve got to be making tape within three years. So being sort of the stubborn sort, we decided to make tape,” Stepp says. “If we hadn’t done it then it could have never been done. The equipment would have been gone and we could not have afforded to ever have it built again.”

And as far as I can tell, the tape head is basically identical between a cassette player (a cheap one, anyway) and a credit card reader. And those factory setups must either be the same or very similar. Here’s a Hungarian company (along with many Chinese companies) that makes heads for various devices.

Their website notes tape storage systems as one use for magnetic heads, which is, of course, another reason why the knowhow around tapes never fully disappeared. However, storage tape and the heads to read it are, I believe, more different from cassette tape/credit card strip heads than these are from each other. So if credit cards had moved to chips and contactless 10 or 15 years earlier, it’s possible that this particular branch of tape-related hardware would have died out.

I find these industrial/manufacturing stories so interesting. What we see, or don’t see, for sale in stores is just the final step in a long, complex story that often has little to do with retailing per se.

And companies like NAC are not just keeping old products in production; they’re keeping knowledge in circulation, embodying it. It’s weird, and good.

Related Reading:

We’re Still Making Car Cassette Players

The Shape of Metal

Mechanical Romance

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 500 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!

Share