I found this interesting: Reel To Reel Tape recorders were first used to record Radio programs just after the 2nd world war

 1935, AEG released the first reel-to-reel tape recorder with the commercial name "Magnetophon". It was based on the invention of the magnetic tape by Fritz Pfleumer in 1928. These machines were very expensive and relatively difficult to use and were therefore used mostly by professionals in radio stations and recording studios.

After the Second World War, the magnetic tape recording technology proliferated across the world. In the US, Ampex, using equipment obtained in Germany as a starting point, began commercial production of tape recorders. First used in studios to record radio programs, tape recorders quickly found their way into schools and homes. By 1953, 1 million US homes had tape machines.^[9]

end partial quote from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#Introduction_of_the_Compact_Cassette 

My father was always "ahead of the curve" regarding all technology. For example, in the late 1930s he bought one of the first 16 mm color movie cameras and then took it on a yacht he financed to the Tahiti 

Tuomoto Archipeligo. We now have movies of Tahiti from 1939 even before World war II happened. We converted after my father passed away in 1985 the 16mm color movies to VHS and then when Dvds came out we converted the VHS to DVDs. I bought a Vhs to DVD converter which is much less expensive than having someone else do it by the way.

And what is really amazing is that the DVD quality is about 10 times what the VHS or even 16mm quality is (at least on what I converted myself. So, I was really really pleased with what I converted to Vhs and then to DVDs. Because then I could make DVD copies easily with the results for any family members interested in my father's adventure with his first wife and brother when he was 24 to Tahiti and the Tuomoto Archipeligo and when they saw the war coming they took a steam ship to Hawaii and then his first wife worked for the newspaper in Honolulu while he and his brother went back to Seattle to work for their father as Electricians after being Gone to Tahiti and Hawaii for a couple of years before the World War.

However, if you are going to buy converters now you need to know what you are doing. For example, my older daughter is now a digital Film editor and so she is technical enough to succeed at all this. When I just wanted to show you VHS to DVD converters they showed me something that converts VHS and DVDs to pure digital for online use likely at youtube or something like this.

For me, without my daughter's help that is sort of "over my head" at the moment because I started learning only a bare minimum regarding computer stuff starting when I converted to Apple computers around 2005 because I was tired of my IBM pentium clones crashing with viruses.

If you have something like a Macbook pro laptop like I travel the world with it usually doesn't crash at all. And if it does you need to take it to an apple store at that point anyway to get it fixed.

My father bought his first "Reel to Reel" tape recorder around 1953 when it said there were about 1 million of them in homes across the U.S. I'm not really sure what he intended to do with it other than record family and friends by putting it behind the sofa though at that time.

He taught me to love technology too and trained me to be an electrician from 12 to 17 so I would have at least one trade before going to college to become a computer scientist or computer programmer. I even went and worked with him at 21 when I realized my computer career couldn't exist in the way that I wanted it to. until maybe now here in 2022 because Chips weren't anywhere but NASA then in the 1960s. They didn't exist in U.S. businesses at least at that point separate from NASA or military applications. The other thing we didn't have yet was RAM (random Access Memory) this is really important because it speeds up things in incredible ways when you can get at information in many many different ways and not just in one way. One way in the 1950s and 1960s was incredibly tedious and cumbersome to the point of madness. So, when chips and random access memory became mainstream in the early to late 1980s EVERYTHING RADICALLY CHANGED! from then on.

So, by the time I got to be 21 I realized and was disappointed that I couldn't do in the computer field what I wanted to for about 50 years. Once I realized this I changed careers and started moving towards buying businesses and having computers become a hobby for me then.