Lou Ottens, who led development of both the Compact Cassette and the Compact Disc for Philips, has died, as reported in The Netherlands.

“More than 100 billion cassette tapes and 200 billion CDs have been sold.”

Igor Bonifacic writes on Engadget:

“It’s difficult to overstate the importance of cassette tapes to music culture. We wouldn’t have mixtapes and playlists without them. What’s more, they allowed people to listen to their favorite songs and albums on the go. No ads or input from a radio DJ. That’s something that has come to define how people enjoy music ever since. And for all of their flaws, in recent years, cassette tapes have enjoyed something of a resurgence in popularity.”

See the CASSETTE: A Documentary Mixtape film.

Lou Ottens was 94.

My take: Oh, wow. I remember buying cassettes for my Sony Walkman and various boomboxes. I can also remember taping albums to make them portable but can’t say I ever made any mixtapes. Yikes! Just remembered my CoCo II computer used a cassette to store programs, kinda like this: