Magnetic strip cartridge for rotating-head file

A strip of magnetic tape is attached to a stiff nonmagnetic backing sheet so that it can lie flat and be contained in an envelope. When partially withdrawn from the envelope, a loop is formed from the strip. The loop can be wrapped around a rotating head assembly for writing and reading and can be moved along the axis of the rotating head to register a multiplicity of tracks. Experimental results project that a strip contained in an envelope, 76.2 × 254 × 2.54 mm (3 × 10 × 0.1 inch), can store at least 10
⁷
bytes of data with a track-access time of less than 0.5 seconds.