What we know of as the cassette tape first hit the market in 1963 in Europe and 1964 in the United States under the trademark name Compact Cassette. But it wasn’t the first magnetic tape for sound recording—that was developed by German engineer Fritz Pfleumer in 1928. AEG introduced the first commercial tape recorder in 1935 with its reel-to-reel machine, which, until the 1960s, was unwieldy, prohibitively expensive, and largely used by...Continue Reading