For those of us old enough to use cassettes, there’s a certain joyous nostalgia about the form factor. About the size of a deck of cards, pretty robust, the cassette was the way to listen to music for many years. Indeed, creating your own mixtapes was an art form all its own, and the term is still in use today.
Tapedeck.org is a love letter to the tape, and has archived nearly 1000 different brands, colors, and types of cassettes, for your nostalgic viewing.
Oliver Gelbrich is the person behind the project, and it’s impressive how deep the collection goes. First invented by Philips in 1963, the compact cassette would go on to be the world’s most popular listening medium, thanks to players like Sony, and the original Walkman.
There are a few companies still making tapes today, and there has been a mini-resurgence in the use of them, the way that vinyl saw a resurgence in the 1990s and 2000s.
Visit Tapedeck to see hundreds of vintage brands, colors, running times, and more.
‘There’s an amazing range of designs, starting from the early 60s functional cassette designs, moving through the colourful playfulness of the 70s audio tapes to amazing shape variations during the 80s and 90s.’
