(p. A9) Lou Ottens was thinking about convenience and portability when he told his product development team at Philips to come up with something better than reel-to-reel tapes.
He and his colleagues produced the cassette tape, . . .
. . .
“We expected it would be a success but not a revolution,” Mr. Ottens said in the 2016 documentary “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape.”
. . .
Mr. Ottens later was involved in development of the compact disc, introduced in the early 1980s. He was puzzled by the revival of demand for cassette tapes among young people in recent years. “People prefer a worse quality of sound, out of nostalgia,” he said. As for himself, he told Time magazine in 2013, “I like when something new comes.”
. . .
The idea came to him, he said, one night after he struggled to thread tape through a bulky reel-to-reel player. A colleague quipped that the cassette was inspired by “the clumsiness of a very clever man.”
. . .
In the documentary, Mr. Ottens insisted that he was untroubled by the demise of technology he helped create. “I don’t believe in eternity,” he said.
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date March 12, 2021, and has the title “Lou Ottens Led Team That Invented the Cassette Tape.”)