SONY TC-182

The TC-100 was Sony’s first cassette recorder and so became the first step on the path that would eventually lead to the Walkman a decade later. Sony’s choice to adopt the Philips Compact Cassette format rather than developing an incompatible one of their own did much do popularise tape recording, which became an attractive and viable domestic activity with the establishment of the cassette as the single worldwide standard. Had this not happened the market would have probably fragmented, something that occurred with the various mini and micro cassette formats in the following years where at least two European and two Japanese systems competed for recognition, limiting to the medium to business users and ensuring that pre-recorded releases, a key part of any audio format, would never become a marketable reality.