It is with sadness that we note the passing away, at the age of 94, of long-time Phillips engineer Lou Ottens, best known as the creator of the Compact Cassette audio tape format, so ubiquitous in the last decades of the 20th century. Whether you remember tapes as the format for 8-bit software, for teen mixtapes on a Walkman, they started life in your hands in the early 1960s at the Phillips plant in Hasselt, Belgium.
Over a long career at the Dutch electronics company, he was directly or partially responsible for a series of consumer electronic devices that we would see as ubiquitous in the second half of the century. Before the tape, he had developed the company’s first portable tape-to-reel recorder and, in the 1970s, as technical director of the audio division, he led the team that would develop the CD. He was reported as saying that his biggest regret was not having beaten Sony in developing the miniature tape player that would be sold as the Walkman, but we suggest that the Walkman would not have been possible without the tape in the first place.
So, the next time you handle a cassette tape, think of Lou, an audio engineer whose work has spanned much of the last half century.
Thanks [Carl] for the tip.
Images: Lou Ottens by Jordi Huisman CC BY-SA 4.0 and “An early Phillips cassette recorder” by mib18 CC BY-SA 3.0