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It is with sadness that we note the passing at the age of 94 of longtime Phillips engineer Lou Ottens, who is best known for being the creator of the Compact Cassette audio cassette format that was so ubiquitous during of the last decades of the 20th century. Whether you remember cassettes as a format for 8-bit software, for teenage mixtapes on a Walkman, they began life in his hands in the early 1960s at the Phillips factory in Hasselt, Belgium.
During a long career with the Dutch electronics company, he was directly or partially responsible for a series of consumer electronics that we would consider ubiquitous in the second half of the century. Prior to the cassette, he had developed the company’s first portable reel tape recorder, and in the 1970s, as technical director of their audio division, he led the team that would develop the CD. He reportedly said his great regret hadn’t beaten Sony for developing the miniature cassette player that would be sold as the Walkman, but we suggest the Walkman wouldn’t have been possible without the cassette in the first place.
So the next time you’re handling a tape, think of Lou, an audio engineer whose work has permeated much of the past half-century.
Thank you [Carl] for the tip.
Images: Lou Ottens by Jordi Huisman CC BY-SA 4.0 and “An old Phillips cassette tape recorder” by mib18 CC BY-SA 3.0
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