if anyone was asking if the cassette was able to hold the data of a novel, imma nerd out here and answer your questions
1. using data from real life
a post on reddit says that you can store ~21mb digital data on a 90-minute cassette tape. assuming the data the disk is able to hold is directly proportional to the audio length the cassette can hold, the amount of digital data a 120 minute cassette tape could hold is ~29mb
depending on how the novel’s contents were encoded, the amount of text data the cassette could hold can vary, but assuming the text was written in the unicode utf-8 encoding (which most japanese sites use), the cassette could store ~10 million characters, equivalent to all complete works by shakespeare combined.
calculations:
21.6mb/3*4=28.8mb
28.8mb=30198988.8b
taking average bytes used to represent characters in japanese using utf-8 encoding (3b/character):
30198988.8b/3b=10066329.6 characters
2. using data provided
okitegami said that the magnetic tape is able to hold 500kb of digital data, so lets assume that is correct in this situation.
using the same methods as last time, we can calculate the amount of characters 500kb can represent, which is ~170 thousand characters, equivalent to an average short novel(100 thousand - 250 thousand characters)
calculations:
500kb=512000b
taking average bytes used to represent characters in japanese using utf-8 encoding (3b/character):
512000b/3b=170666.6… characters
of course, it goes without saying to take these results with a grain of salt, since the amount of digital data a cassette with magnetic tape is able to hold varies widely depending on the width of the tape itself, the storage format the cassette uses, and many other factors
thanks for reading my ted talk
