Magnetic tape is one of the older types of magnetic storage media. The magnetic tape recorder was invented in 1928 and was primarily used for analog audio recordings. Before music CDs were introduced in the 1980s, portable music devices used magnetic tape in the form of music cassettes. Early computers adapted this technology to store digital information. One of the major weaknesses is that information on a tape can only be accessed in a very sequential fashion. This is fine if you want to listen to a whole music album in sequence, but computer systems typically need to access data in a non-sequential manner. For magnetic tape, this means you may need to fast forward through a lot of tape to get to a specific piece of data. While magnetic tape is a very cheap way to store data, the very slow access to the data meant that it was primarily used for creating backups of data in case older forms of storage failed. Tape backup systems are still in use today, but their importance has greatly declined with the advance of cheap, large capacity hard-disk drives.