"In the mid-1980s... music networking through things called audio cassettes was at its peak."
Carl Howard, alternative music network pioneer
Like SMS (short message service) text messaging three decades later, the audiotape cassette (or "compact cassette," to give it its official name) is a classic case of an innovation created for one purpose that finds unexpected success for another. Although the cassette (derived from the French word meaning "little box") was an audio storage medium, Philips saw little potential for its use within the high-fidelity music market. It had, in fact, been designed primarily for use in dictation machines and cheap portable recorders.
Introduced in 1963, the cassette slowly established itself in the decade that followed. Its success was largely due to Philips's decision to license aspects of their technology free of charge. The tape used in the early cassette cartridges was thin, low-quality, and only half the width of standard reel-to-reel tape. Since cassettes were reversible—designed to record and play back in both directions—recordings for each "side" had to be squeezed into 1/16th of an inch. The cassette was therefore highly unsuited to capturing the more extreme frequencies.
The compact cassette was never taken seriously by audiophiles, even when Dolby® noise reduction and high-quality chromium dioxide tapes made high- quality recordings possible. Nevertheless, up until the mid-1990s, it was an important format, rivaling, and even surpassing, the vinyl record in some regions.
