Picocassette is an audio storage medium introduced by

Dictaphone Dictaphone was an American company founded by Alexander Graham Bell that produced dictation machines. It is now a division of Nuance Communications, based in Burlington, Massachusetts. Although the name "Dictaphone" is a trademark, it has bec ...

in collaboration with

JVC JVC (short for Japan Victor Company) is a Japanese brand owned by JVCKenwood corporation. Founded in 1927 as the Victor Talking Machine Company of Japan and later as , the company is best known for introducing Japan's first televisions and for ...

in 1985. The Picocassette was introduced to compete with the

Microcassette The Microcassette (often written generically as microcassette) is an audio storage medium, introduced by Olympus in 1969. It has the same width of magnetic tape as the Compact Cassette but in a cassette roughly one quarter the size. By using t ...

, introduced by Olympus, and the

Mini-Cassette The Mini-Cassette, often written minicassette, is a magnetic tape audio cassette format introduced by Philips in 1967. It is used primarily in dictation machines and was also employed as a data storage for the Philips P2000 home computer. As ...

, by

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

Size

It is approximately half the size of the previous

, and was intended for highly portable

dictation Dictation can refer to: *Dictation (exercise), when one person speaks while another person transcribes *'' Dictation: A Quartet'', a collection of short stories by Cynthia Ozick, published in 2008 * Digital dictation, the use of digital electronic ...

devices. With a tape speed of 9 millimeters per second, each cassette could hold up to 60 minutes of dictation,Technology: The Tiniest Tape Ever
May 27, 1985, ''

Time.com ''Time'' (stylized in all caps) is an American news magazine based in New York City. For nearly a century, it was published weekly, but starting in March 2020 it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York City on Mar ...

'', Retrieved 2010-04-06 30 minutes per side. The

signal-to-noise ratio Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power, often expressed in deci ...

was 35 dB. The widest dimension of the picocassette was near 4.2 cm.

References

External links

Image of a Picocassette
(including ruler and

Compact Cassette The Compact Cassette or Musicassette (MC), also commonly called the tape cassette, cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens ...

for comparison), at th
Cassette Recorder Museum
*

Techmoan Matthew "Mat" Taylor, better known by his channel's name Techmoan, is a YouTuber and blogger active since May 2009, featuring consumer tech reviews and retrotech documentaries about technology of historical interest. Apart from reviews and te ...

The Picocassette - Smallest Analogue Cassette Tape ever made
Audio storage Audiovisual introductions in 1985 Tape recording Products introduced in 1985 {{electronics-stub

Size

See also

References

External links