Terms

ANA

Analog tape, your regular old cassette. Cheap, but degrades with copying.

DAT

Digital Audio Tape, its main advantage being that it records digitally, so you can have an all digital recording if the transfer is done digitally. Also does not degrade with copying.

MD

Minidisc. Only came into being around late 1994. Cheap and Small, but records to a lossy compression scheme, and must be transferred by analog. Some new Hi-MD models can record to uncompressed PCM.