If you have $US90 to spend on one of the ties, and you are willing to sacrifice an old Walkman for the project, you can make this a fixture of your formal wardrobe. Of course, walking around with a broken Walkman asking every one to rub you with it is not recommended. [Supermarket via Gadget Lab]

Fortunately for those of us happy to be approaching 2010, Sony also has a couple of models that ditch the tape deck for an iPod dock. The CMTLX30iR and CMTBX20iB retail for $329 and $399 respectively, with the latter having 50W total power compared to the former’s 10W, as well as the ability to use it as an alarm clock. All three units are available now.

[Sony]

A $185 TSC-300 I bought from J&R, my Walkman was also a stereo recorder. (Note the spiffy name—even when it was clueful, Sony was clueless.) No way you could put it in your pocket—it was about the size of a trade paperback book. But the music sounded great, and it doubled as a very solid, if bulky, recorder for interviews.

Besides the Walkman, a real driver of cassettes, so to speak, was the car experience. Cassettes were a big improvement over the first personal car audio technology, 8-Tracks, which had to switch from one “track” to another every few minutes, and to accommodate this, labels would often rearrange the order of songs on an album, or even cut off a long song in the middle. (I once went cross-country in a Trans Am with an 8-track, and to this day every time I hear The Doors play “The End,” my mind inserts an 8-second pause before Jim Morrison kills his dad and fucks his mum.)

As now, people had all kinds of exotic car-stereo rigs, but as an impoverished writer I outfitted my 1972 VW bug with a minimal unit (a no-name brand for $US99) that I bolted under the dashboard and wired up to the speakers. Not pretty, but I could control what music I heard in the car, which was actually a novelty then.

The other big advantage of cassettes, of course, were that they were recordable. You’d buy blank 90-minute cassettes (chrome high bias, if you were an audio nut) and tape one album on each side. (Since most records were shorter than 45 minutes, you’d grab a song or two from another album to avoid a long dead spot before the tape reversed.) And you’d borrow albums from friends and tape your own. You could also tape from other cassettes, but the quality degraded each time you made a copy made from a copy. It was like an organic form of DRM. Everybody had a box with hand-labeled cassettes and before you went on a car trip you’d dig in the box to find the tunes that would soundtrack your journey.

Cassettes weren’t the most reliable technology—it was pretty common for the music to stop and then, when you tried to eject, the player wouldn’t give up the tape. You’d use brute force, and sticking out of the plastic would be a tangle of brown spaghetti. But even though audio cassettes supposedly degrade after 20 years or so, I still have a couple in my car that I made in the ’70s—one of the early Stones, taped from the mono originals, and a Neil Young tape with “Tonight’s the Night” on one side and “On the Beach” on the other. Neither has lost its magnetism, physically or psychically.

The cassette era was a big setup for the age of iPod, a pocket-size digital device that was not only a playback unit, but the equivalent of a room-size cardboard box full of tapes. And, of course, Napster, which made the whole world into a big cassette-tape-swapping community, where everything was free.

Steven Levy is a senior writer for Wired, most recently writing about Google’s ad business and the secret of the CIA sculpture. He’s written six books, including Hackers, Artificial Life and The Perfect Thing, about the iPod. In 1979, he had just left his first real job, at a regional magazine called New Jersey Monthly, to become a freelance writer, and had yet to touch a computer.

Photos of every blank tape ever at tapedeck.org

Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analogue age gave way to the digital, and most of our favourite toys were just being born.

There are Transformers and there are Transformers. And while a 10-story Optimus Prime is OK, this $US42 import features a cassette deck (which, in a manner similar to Soundwave, ALSO features a Transformer), plus it can transform into a netbook. And while this “Qosimo” netbook doesn’t necessarily work, the body serves as a charming guise for the 4-port USB hub that lies beneath.

Now, I don’t want to blow everyone’s minds too hard before a weekend, but imagine, if you will, connecting this USB hub Transformer to more USB hub Transformers. Devastator, stand back. [Product via CraziestGadgets]

UPDATE: OK OK, while both the Autobots’ Blaster and the Decepticons’ Soundwave both had cassette deck capabilities, the robot does more closely resemble Blaster. I am SO SORRY. Stop emailing me, fellow geeks!

Turntables, keyboards, cassettes and boomboxes? Yes please. This designer wallpaper by Aimée Wilder costs $US140 for a diminutive 27″ x 15′ 70cm x 4.5m) roll. Then again, that’s enough probably paper to make your point. [aimeewilder via Unplggd]

Using little else than the parts inside an old GE boombox, Michael Colombo made TapeScape, a robot that front-mounts the jambox’s tape head and uses it to follow strips of cassette tapes on the ground.

The signal from the tape head is transmitted via FM radio to a receiver, which then records the glitchy sound of a robot dutifully following a strip of magnetised acetate. Future revisions will add remote-control. [Instructables via MAKE]

For full resolution, click here.

It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th century that mass-produced recordings were available to the average person—the concept of buying music is amazingly new. (Or to some, ooooooold.) Just a century ago, the first records began to do for music what the Gutenberg press did for words. Before them, music was handed crudely from person to person; after, it could reach millions, untouched and unspoiled.

If we couldn’t record music, the Beatles would have never left Liverpool. By the same token the Jonas Brothers would have never left Georgia or Disney World or the Old Testament or wherever the hell they came from. Talk about progress! There may be no accounting for taste, but you can thank these reproducible formats for the very existence of the notion of pop music.

Listening Test: It’s music tech week at Gizmodo.