I have in my hand a piece of plastic with two Jupiter Ace programs on it - Missile Man and Space Fighter Pilot if you're interested. It is of course a cassette, containing a reel of magnetic tape. It occurs to me that a Micro-SD card, being 15 mm long, 11 mm wide and one millimetre thick, is of a size which lends itself to being stuck on a strip of slightly wider tape. A reel of tape one millimetre thick with a diameter of five cm and a central wheel 2 cm in diameter would consist of around sixty-five such units, with a total capacity of around a terabyte. Whereas it would be possible just to do this with a strip of cards stuck to a tape, I also imagine that they could be packed in more easily if one forgoes some of the packaging. Alternatively, 800-odd could be placed on a vinyl disc the size of an LP. To read them, er...

OK, to read them, place them edge on and have them kerchunk into a thingy, and in fact, tell you what, just have a disc studded with them arranged edge-on and you get a capacity of around six terabytes minimum single- sided.
-- nineteenthly, Nov 16 2013

Flexible electronics http://www.nature.c.../full/nmat3759.html
As mentioned in an annotation. [Vernon, Nov 16 2013]

gravity-powered tic-tac-toe-playing computers made of tinker toys http://www.retrothi...he_tinkertoy_c.html
As mentioned in an annotation [CraigD, Nov 16 2013]

So not actual analogue tapes and LPs, miniaturised to the size of a SD card?
-- pocmloc, Nov 16 2013


Well, you could go that way too but that's not where I've gone this time.
-- nineteenthly, Nov 16 2013


Considering recent efforts to develop fully-flexible electronic stuff, the Idea of combining a lot of small flexible segments into an overall "tape" is not far- fetched.
-- Vernon, Nov 16 2013


Rather than having moving parts, wouldn't it make more sense to have all the microSD cards electrically connected to a controller that would switch between them as needed electronically? Since they usually contain multiple flash memory chips, this is essentially what ordinary *SD card are. as are larger solid state disc drives.

This idea is from one POV for a card-switching robot, from another, for a very slow (on the order of 10,000,000 times seek time) SSDD. While robots are fun and cool as amusements in and of themselves, I don't think many folk find very slow storage devices much fun.

I put the idea in a category between practical and novelty like gravity-powered tic-tac-toe-playing computers made of tinker toys (a must-see stop on my geek's Boston tour guide) - fun to watch a few times, but not something you'd want to use often.
-- CraigD, Nov 16 2013


There are advantages to having data storage physically disconnected from the computer, e.g for securing backups from malicious software.
-- pocmloc, Nov 16 2013


This is Indeed not a terribly practical suggestion, hence its location here rather than in a patent application.
-- nineteenthly, Nov 16 2013


Any idea is improved by having them kerchunk into a thingy, I'll grant you that.
-- pertinax, Nov 21 2013


[pertinax], you just made me cry with laughter, probably because I've blancmanged my brain.
-- nineteenthly, Dec 12 2013



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