Digital Audio Tape DAT -- they tried REALLY hard to keep this technology out of the US market. Eventually they got a the authorities to impose a surcharge per blank DAT tape for 'lost income'.

Writable CDs came soon after which was probably going to kill DAT market no matter what.

Trivia: SGI DAT drives will read and write audio DAT.

The CD drives offered "Save Track As" in the default OS.

Since the original version of DDS tape is basically just DAT tapes being used to store computer data, many of the commercially-available DDS drives could be re-flashed to allow them to read DAT as well. (Re-flashing was necessary to remove the software restriction that otherwise recognised DAT tapes and refused to read them).

I'm not going to post any links, but there's plenty of info online.

Indeed. Really, I was speaking to nice, open computers. Did what people expected out of the box.