ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Digital Audio Tape

So you know how sometimes you listen to music on a CD or an MP3 player? Well, before those, people used different types of tapes to listen to music or record songs they made. One kind of tape was called a digital audio tape, or DAT for short.

DAT tapes were like little cassettes, but they were special because they used digital technology to record and play back sound. That means instead of recording sound the way we hear it with our ears, it turned sounds into numbers and stored them on the tape.

When you wanted to listen to music on a DAT tape, you had to use a special machine called a DAT recorder. This machine could read the numbers on the tape, turn them back into sound, and play the music through speakers, headphones, or other devices.

People liked DAT tapes because they could record and play back high-quality sound, which means the music sounded really clear and nice. But eventually, other kinds of technology like CDs and MP3s became more popular, and fewer people used DAT tapes.

Nowadays, you might not hear much about DAT tapes, but they were an important part of how people listened to and made music in the past.