Over the last year or so I have really got into cassette players. It started with my interest in 8 bit computers many of which needed a domestic cassette player to get started. The fancier ones (eg the BBC Micro, Atari 400 / 800 etc) had officially branded (and no doubt very expensive) units but the more affordable ones (like my first computer, the Sinclair Spectrum) did not. For this and other reasons there was a huge market for low cost ‘compact cassette’ players, quite different from that for the enthusiasts ‘high fidelity deck’ designs. There is a whole separate history about the rise of the ‘compact cassette’ itself which has been extensively covered elsewhere so I won’t go into that here.
What is evident is that there was also a clear interest in self-contained units with a microphone and loudspeaker built in which were reasonably portable and could be run from batteries (in many ways the fore-runner of the ‘Walkman’). I’ve not really done enough research on this yet, and so I’m not sure quite when it started but the form factor which emerged was a small rectangular unit, similar in width to the cassette with the speaker above and a series of mechanical controls below. These often were referred to as ‘slimline’ designs.
I began picking these up for a few pounds here or there initially because I wanted something to for loading cassette games into my Spectrum, but after a while I became fascinated by the sheer range and variety of these devices, and their longevity. The earliest one I have found dates I think from the late 1960s and is a Philips model. I actually have 2 of these, bought on successive weeks from different sellers for the local car boot. On a recent visit to the official Philips museum in Eindhoven I was very pleased to see an identical (although much cleaner!) model.
They were certainly still popular in the mid to late 1980s fuelled no doubt by the home computer boom and possibly beyond that. I’ve lost count of exactly how many I have – probably 20 or so – and every one is different. Some are clearly bargain basement designs (such as those sold by Dixons in the 80s) whereas others are heavyweight and clearly serious pieces of kit with multiple controls, or else ‘ruggedised’ with bomb-proof thick plastic cases which were probably for educational purposes. I have some others too of different designs including the hifi style decks, and whilst I do like those too I think the slimline units are actually more interesting, more varied but yet much less regarded or documented.
Universal Discovery Methodology 