I suppose that many (if not most) of you have never owned a cassette tape, considering that they have been pretty much obsolete for a decade. There was a day when cassettes were the cutting edge of recording medium technology. When I was 8 or so, I asked for a portable reel-to-reel recorder for Christmas. Yes, there was such a thing. My dad, who is an amateur radio operator, went to the electronics store where he bought gear to get one. The salesman talked him into a portable cassette recorder, which he said was the wave of the future. Not only was it the first cassette anyone I knew had seen, it was probably a year or more before cassette tapes began appearing in other stores. The cassette was the preferred portable recording medium from the mid-1970s to the early-1990s, and they are still around.
So, why would someone want a cassette tape deck in their computer? The primary purpose of this gadget is for converting music recorded on cassette tapes to MP3s. Suppose you just inherited your dad's collection of 80's hair bands or your mom's collection of disco music and want to convert those tapes to MP3. Personally, since I have a digital recording sound card and run my computer through a stereo, I have had this capability for a while, though I felt it was a pain to do so.
The BTO Plus Deck 2c Tape Converter arrived in the box you see above. The Plus Deck 2c is well protected in this shelf made of corrugated cardboard which does much less harm to the environment than the various types of foam that most companies use. I imagine it is made from recycled paper...if not, it could be. Though far from being an environmentalist, I do feel that we should do what we can to protect the Earth.
Here is the BTO Plus Deck 2c PC Cassette Deck. I guess it looks pretty much like I would expect a cassette deck that fits in a 5 1/4" drive bay to look.
