Me and my cassette

For nearly 20 years of my life, I have struggled with Lou Ottens' 1963 invention: the cassette tape. What is remembered is not an ordinary musical experience, but something entirely different. A little ode to my accompanying media from the 1980s and 1990s.

Nico Gurtner/Museum of Communication

My first cassette player – the little magic box in my childhood room! A flat speaker, a groove for inserting tapes, five large buttons and a small button labeled “Eject” – all lined up one behind the other. The red record button is considered a major turn-off. It eliminates the annoying gaps in my beloved Kasperli tapes. Most of the time, I pressed the right button and let the tape slide past the tape head. I listened with fascination to the story the magic box told me.

I became the DJ in the kids' room, sometimes running Häx Nörgeligäx at high speed. Of course, I quickly discovered that if you don't press the play button all the way, you can play the tape at three times the speed. High, fast sounds aren't without risk – there's usually a crunching noise after a short time, and then the speaker goes quiet. All I could hear was the whir of a clogged rotating motor. Oops! I carefully removed the cassette using the eject button and then pulled the derailed cassette out from between the tape heads. Luckily, this stuff is difficult – you can almost always get it out, even if it ends up dramatically crumpling into an accordion.

Now the hard work of handwork begins: untie the knot, stretch the strap as smoothly as possible and push it back into the casing with a pencil without twisting it. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably in these moments that I developed a connection with tape—a medium that has stayed with me for years. To be honest, I still miss it a little bit today.

My cassette player doesn't look as elegant as this device in the museum's collection. But the basic structure is the same.Image: Communications Museum, ITT Schaub-Lorenz SL 55 automatic recorder, 9808_817_017_1

From a piece of wood to a mass media

At this point, the invention of the compact magnetic tape was already 20 years ago. It was developed by Dutchman Lou Ottens together with his team at Philips in Hasselt (Belgium). Magnetic tapes have been around since the late 1950s, but they were bulky and cumbersome. Inventor and engineer Ottens thought the new medium should fit in his jacket pocket. According to legend, he cut a piece of wood to size. This is the standard that new developments must now meet.

On August 28 or 30, 1963 (the date cannot be reconstructed accurately), Philips presented a completely new development at the international radio exhibition IFA in (West) Berlin: the compact cassette. The reaction is initially controllable. There's a lot of noise, especially internally, because not everyone is informed. Another team in Vienna is working with Grundig on a more luxurious cassette project. There was a lot of anger there – Grundig left the project in anger and brought his own cassette system to market two years later. No success.

Compact cassettes, on the other hand, are taking the world by storm. It is estimated that global tape sales will reach a staggering 100 billion in the next few decades. The Walkman, the tape's flagship application (launched by Sony in 1979), also contributed to this. Lou Ottens is already working on a new project. He was also one of the main developers of the compact disc (CD), introduced in 1981.

Some of my tapes and homemade tape cassettes have stood the test of time.Photo: Nico Gurtner/Communications Museum

Leave the children's room

The first pimples sprouted slowly in my childhood room, as the Bravo posters on the wall changed, and so did the contents of the tapes: from Emil to Otto Waalkes, to Pink Floyd, grunge, doom metal, and more. A twisted, rap. I'm still loyal to the tape. a lot of. I carefully designed my tape covers using small collages, drawings and artifacts.

CDs have long been the carrier medium of music, but they are expensive. An album costs 30 francs. This doesn't fit into my limited budget. So I'd rather buy a pair of Maxell Type II, 90 minutes. Then I played friends' CDs, recorded from the radio and made my first mixtape.

Until the late 1990s, these tapes and my Walkman were my daily companions, and my voice was always with me.

To this day, I still can’t get rid of some tapes—mostly mixtapes from friends. Even though I haven’t had a playback device in years. Each playlist has a series of images in my mind that automatically start with the song and take me back in time.

Interestingly, one of my son's friends recently rediscovered Otto Walks. Now, 9-year-olds hear “Help, Otto is Coming!” Hansel and Gretel Variations, just as I did almost 40 years ago. I can still see the red and yellow letters OTTO printed on the cassette cover along with the black and white picture. I cut them out of the magazine at the time to give the cover a dignified look.

The content is the same, but the media usage has changed significantly. My son plays all of this from a platform that offers 100 million songs. What will his memory of this day look like one day?

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