Technology I learned about from EOTO 1

 

The cassette tape was one of the more exciting technologies I learned about in the EOTO presentations. For me, cassette tapes have been a short-lived piece of media because they were very flimsy, didn't sound too good, and were replaced by CDs. But to my surprise, the cassette first hit the market in 1963 as a way to make listening to your favorite music on the go instead of having a record player bounce in your car skipping tracks with every bump you hit. I also thought that the cassette was an American invention but it turned out to be a Belgian invention. 

Cassettes were not only for listening to music but for recording stuff too. Blank tapes were also made and could record memos, custom answering machine voicemails, and recording riffs for your band so you don't forget what you made. But the cassette had its downsides being made of cheap plastic, causing them to break easily, any prolonged heat exposure caused the cassettes to melt or warp the recording on it, and after prolonged use of the cassette, they wore down and didn't sound nearly as good. Which, eventually, caused them to be replaced by CDs in the 90s as the best form of media to purchase

I own a few cassette tapes but I never really got interested in them. I really love vinyl and have a ton of records back home with a nice record player. But I knew a lot about vinyl already so learning more about a "phased out" piece of media. The reason I say phased out is because a few bands still use cassettes as a way of sharing their music. Metallica, for example, released an album back in April 2023 and one of the ways you could buy the album was by cassette. There are so many ways to listen to music now but I'm glad there is still a niche for cassettes. Cassettes served their purpose back in the 70s and 80s but the world moved on to more stable media like the CD then iPods, and then streaming services. And more recently, vinyl made a reintroduction to the music world but cassettes never caught on like vinyl. It's sad to see but that's the way life is sometimes.