It’s slightly less absurd than that, I guess, because modern smartphones do at least still have telephone functionality.
Plenty of kids I grew up with also called Nintendo and Atari cartridges “tapes.” It made sense from an ergonomic standpoint and from the point of view of someone who had no interest in understanding what was actually going on inside the machine. It’s a rectangular plastic thing you put in the machine to make it play whatever it says on the label. Just like a VHS tape, see? Same same.
The thing with tape was that it described the actual medium inside the casing, all the way back to the time before the tape itself came in the casing and was just loose on a spool. This would have been state of the art in the 1960’s. It’s possible that Original Series Star Trek foresaw the possibility of solid state-ish storage with no tape reels inside, but probably not. (Their computers also exhibit a distressing lack of displays, so I’m not sure the producers were too good at being prescient.) And for what it’s worth, I do know a few oldsters who now call the various small card based flash media formats “memory chips,” which I guess is pretty close to accurate. TnG did this too with their “isolinear chips,” whatever the hell those were supposed to be made of.
Anyway, we do have a limited selection of “phones” without the phone feature, e.g. things like the iPod Touch which was basically an early-gen iPhone with the phone cut out. Nobody could really decide what to call these, with the closest thing to a standard being “pocket media players,” which turns into the rather non-melodious “PMP.” (With this I guess we missed the chance to call wi-fi enabled variants “pocket internet media players,” and therefore have the opportunity to label these “PIMPs,” which is obviously much cooler.)
To jump on with this, sometime in TV, especially with sports broadcasts or recaps, I still hear hosts say something like, “let’s go to the videotape” even though basically no one is using tape anymore for these things.
Plenty of kids I grew up with also called Nintendo and Atari cartridges “tapes.”
Our household referred to NES cartridges as “tapes”, as well. I think for our family, it came from us frequenting a local video rental store, usually once a week. We’d pick up some movies and some games every time we’d go. It started with just movies, though, because our local store didn’t carry games at first. But once we started renting games there, we just kept called everything in the bag “tapes”.
It’s slightly less absurd than that, I guess, because modern smartphones do at least still have telephone functionality.
Plenty of kids I grew up with also called Nintendo and Atari cartridges “tapes.” It made sense from an ergonomic standpoint and from the point of view of someone who had no interest in understanding what was actually going on inside the machine. It’s a rectangular plastic thing you put in the machine to make it play whatever it says on the label. Just like a VHS tape, see? Same same.
The thing with tape was that it described the actual medium inside the casing, all the way back to the time before the tape itself came in the casing and was just loose on a spool. This would have been state of the art in the 1960’s. It’s possible that Original Series Star Trek foresaw the possibility of solid state-ish storage with no tape reels inside, but probably not. (Their computers also exhibit a distressing lack of displays, so I’m not sure the producers were too good at being prescient.) And for what it’s worth, I do know a few oldsters who now call the various small card based flash media formats “memory chips,” which I guess is pretty close to accurate. TnG did this too with their “isolinear chips,” whatever the hell those were supposed to be made of.
Anyway, we do have a limited selection of “phones” without the phone feature, e.g. things like the iPod Touch which was basically an early-gen iPhone with the phone cut out. Nobody could really decide what to call these, with the closest thing to a standard being “pocket media players,” which turns into the rather non-melodious “PMP.” (With this I guess we missed the chance to call wi-fi enabled variants “pocket internet media players,” and therefore have the opportunity to label these “PIMPs,” which is obviously much cooler.)
upvoted for all the work you put into that, but our judges would have accepted “technically not true”.
You have, like, seen my post history, right?
Lol
To jump on with this, sometime in TV, especially with sports broadcasts or recaps, I still hear hosts say something like, “let’s go to the videotape” even though basically no one is using tape anymore for these things.
Our household referred to NES cartridges as “tapes”, as well. I think for our family, it came from us frequenting a local video rental store, usually once a week. We’d pick up some movies and some games every time we’d go. It started with just movies, though, because our local store didn’t carry games at first. But once we started renting games there, we just kept called everything in the bag “tapes”.