That's right - "slightly bigger and totally incompatible" sums it up to a T. I had a school friend who had such a machine and kept going on about how much better than it was than the Philips, which was probably true, c.f. Betamax v. VHS...
Thanks for confirming that is was Grundig.
The Elcaset I well remember; a nice idea but much too late. It gets a mention in Wikipedia's list of commercial failures at
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@care2.com saying something like:
The CC was definitely out before the 8-track; afair, the usual format wars were taking place between the manufacturers and the 8-track was just another format with the usual pros and cons. Philips then trumped everybody by dropping its licence fee for the production of CCs to near zero.
Suddenly everybody started making CCs and the rest is history. The CC wasn't all that great, but it was simple and mostly reliable and the subsequent decades saw a tremendous improvement on its qualities.
Must have been long before. I remember when in primary school a student teacher with one of these latest compact cassette portables using it in a class. Battery operated and mono, that would have been before '66. The pre recorded cassettes were around almost from the beginning but did not take off for a few years. The oldest pre-recorded tapes in my collection date from around 1975.
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