RIP Lou Ottens, Inventor of the Cassette Tape

Lou Ottens, the inventor responsible for making music literally fit in the palm of your hand, has died at the age of 94. The Dutch native was the head of product development at Philips in the early 1960s when he began developing cassettes as an answer to the large and unwieldy reel-to-reel tape format. He started with a small wooden block that fit in his pocket as the model of what he hoped to achieve: making music more accessible and portable. Ottens and Philips unveiled the first "compact cassette" in 1963, and it immediately took off.

"It was a big surprise for the market," Ottens, told TIME back in 2013 in honor of the cassette's 50th birthday. "It was so small in comparison with reel-to-reel recorders that it was at that moment a sensation."

Ever the pioneer, Ottens went on to help develop compact discs in 1979, with the inventor already over cassettes, decrying the format's penchant for noise and distortion. It was in April of 1982 when Philips showed off the first production CD player. "From now on, the conventional record player is now obsolete," Ottens said at the time.

When the cassette format saw a huge resurgence among young music fans over the past 10 years, even Ottens was shocked: "There are a number of people who are still using it," he said in 2016 doc, Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape. "We expected that it would be a success, not a revolution." When asked if he had any regrets over his storied career, Ottens said there was only one: that Sony was the company to develop the Walkman, not Philips. As far as Ottens was concerned, it was "the ideal application for the cassette. It still hurts that we didn't have one."