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.

[4] This is mechanically simple and allows the cassette to be made smaller and easier to use, but produces a system unsuited to any task other than voice recording, as the tape speed is not constant (averaging 2.4 cm/s) and prone to wow and flutter.

However, the lack of a capstan and a pinch roller drive means that the tape is well-suited to being repeatedly shuttled forward and backward short distances as compared to microcassettes, leading to the Mini-Cassette's use in the first generations of telephone answering machines, and continuing use in the niche markets of dictation and transcription, where fidelity is not critical, but robustness of storage is, and where analog media remained in use long after digital media had been introduced.

Philips later introduced a smaller version of the cassette called an Ultra Mini-Cassette that had a max record time of 10 minutes on each side of the tape.

A Sony Mini-Cassette dictation recorder