Well, not really but Currys is joining HMV and Woolworths in not stocking blank tapes any more. I got my first cassette player in 1971. It was a Phillips battery operated machine with a microphone that was attached to the side. I spent a very happy Christmas taping tunes off my record player and bits of televison films. The first pre-recorded cassettes I got were the soundtrack to 2001: a Space Odyssey and the Bernard Haitink Holst's The Planets. Amazingly, I still have both tapes.
The tapes only really came into their own when I got a radio cassette player for university. A big black Panasonic machine (I still have that as well!) it cost £199 in 1979! That is about £800 in today's money. I had most of my early sexual experiences to the sounds of that machine. I spent hours taping my records onto cassettes during the holidays.
Then, of course, I got my first Walkman in 1982 (actually, I think it was a Boots one. It was blue and cost £9.99) and started the long slow process of happily destroying my hearing, now continued by my beloved iPod. I got through a Walkman roughly every six months. They were not well made.
So, its goodbye cassettes and the fun of trying to salvage a favourite that had got eaten by my Walkman by opening up the cassette (I always bought ones which were screwed together not glued) and trying to untwist the tape which then always wanted to go back into a corkscrew shape when you let go..
When I re-install my hi-fi, when my new shelves arrive shortly, I probably won't even bother with the cassette recorder.
Another era ends..
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