EMITape

EMI produced blank quarter inch magnetic tape commercially from around the mid-1950s up to 1981, both for studio and domestic use. The reels are usually around 4″ to 7″ diameter for domestic use, and the packaging is always very prosaic. In the same way DCRs were sold in very dull packaging, there was no real need to make this sort of technical product very exciting; it was something you needed and went out to buy.  This example came my way recently, and is very typical. In this case it’s an empty plastic spool, retailed in a cardboard box with a flat industrial style image of the product, and some details on various languages. The EMITAPE type, solid and outline, was used for many years, and later appeared on the blank cassettes as well.  Simple orange and black print on white. Job done.  It dates from the 1960s, and features the older EMI oval logo which also appeared on album sleeves at the time. The example below is I think from the 1980s, by which time the tape came in a plastic shell box.  In both cases the packaging was designed to be robust so it could be used for archiving the recordings safely. Domestic reel to reel machines went out of fashion in the late 70s as cassettes largely did the job just as well for most people.