Audio cassette
The standard audio cassette was invented in 1962 by Lou Ottens of the Philips company. They named it the "Compact Cassette". The first cassettes and cassette recorders had poor audio quality. They were used for recording speech rather than music. Over time, audio quality improved, and they became usable for music. During the 1970s, the cassette grew to be a popular physical format for audio. Their popularity grew further during the following decades. The Walkman, released in 1979, made the cassette very popular in the 1980s. In the 1990s, CDs became more popular than cassettes for prerecorded music, however the cassette remained the most popular format for homemade recordings until CD recorders became affordable in the early 2000s.