How does CD-ROM compare to magnetic tape?

We could produce our interactive publications on magnetic tape instead of CD-ROM. Reasons to publish on magnetic tape are: More people have magnetic tape drives. Tape technology is better understood by more people. We can easily make magnetic tapes cheaply and in moderate numbers. A shirt-pocket size magnetic tape will hold 2 gigabytes. That is four times as big as a CD-ROM.

Reasons to produce our interactive publications on CD-ROM are: When we hand a CD-ROM to someone and they put it in their drive, they have instantaneously mounted 680 Mb (megabytes) of our file system in their computer. They did not first need to clear 680 Mb of space in their computer and they did not need to wait two hours for the tape to read. CD-ROM is more suited than magnetic tape to please the recipient. Thus CD-ROM is a better publication medium.

CD-ROM readers are likely to become more numerous than tape readers because manufacturers have begun distributing software on CD-ROM and the drives themselves are cheaper than tape readers. We recently purchased some for $ 431 each (including academic discount) whereas 2 Gb tapes cost multiple thousands of dollars.