Today, to listen to a song, all we need to do is open YouTube, search for the title (or even lyrics if we don't remember the title), and within seconds, we are listening to the tune that's been stuck in our heads and we've been humming for the past 5 days. We can also, for free or with a subscription, listen to almost any album or perhaps even the entire discography of any band or artist. But 25 years ago, things were not like this.

The cassette was a technology simple in its conception. It was a small plastic casing containing a magnetic tape, on which sound could be recorded, such as music, speech, or other sounds. The tape was wound around two spools, and by moving the tape through the cassette, sound could be recorded or played back.

There were many uses for it. From listening to music recorded by a studio to capturing the inarticulate screams you made with your friends to pass the time. However, the most common use was to make a mixtape of different songs, which usually expressed feelings for someone else and was intended as a gift for that person.

I admit that I never bought an original cassette with music, because another common practice was to copy entire albums for our friends, and they would do the same for others. Obviously, this was something the record companies didn't want, but there was no technology at the time to stop it.

The Use of Cassettes in Computers

Another use of cassettes was with computers. In the 1980s, there was a significant rise in the home computer market. One of the storage mediums... who am I kidding? The best way to play a game was to find a pirated cassette with the game on it. There were external devices that would read the magnetic tape of the cassette and transfer the data to the computer's memory. Just like with floppy disks, except instead of reading a magnetic disk, they read a magnetic tape.

The Walkman

However, without the cassette, we would never have been able to carry music with us everywhere. So, in the late 70s, Sony gave us a groundbreaking invention—the Walkman. I won't write much here since the Walkman and its derivatives deserve an article of their own, but it's important to note that the small size of the cassette helped in the development of the Walkman. It certainly wouldn’t have been as easy to carry around a portable turntable to listen to "Battery" by Metallica.

Although the audio cassette was hugely popular in the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of CDs and digital formats, its use gradually declined. However, it remains a symbol of the analog era and music culture.