I was left wondering when the Sanyo cartridge was designed. For the background you need to watch Techmoan's video on gthe Grundig DC series cassette. In that he describes how Sony only decided to use the Philips Compact Cassette because they persuaded Philips to allow them to do so Royalty Free. If Philips had stuck to their guns and demanded Royalties the Compact Cassette could have ended up being as popular as Apple's Firewire interface.
Philips probably figured that Sony had such huge market share in everywhere but Europe the tape sales would make up for it. That would make a great docu-drama, how Philips conquered the market with it's compact cassette and what followed.
I think there’s a murky reason why Phillips got their noses in front. I’m sure there’s a patent issue somewhere and money changed hands but I can no longer remember what happened
No money changed hands at all. What better source of the story than Sony themselves ? https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/2-05.html while looking for that I found another interesting article https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2013/08/30/50_years_of_the_compact_cassette/ The idea of putting tape inside a plastic cartridge certainly wasn't new when the Compact Cassette came out. Something interesting is that Kodak came up with exactly the same idea for film in 1963. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/126_film Who else had a 126 camera as their first one ?
I just watched the feature linked to in theregister article about the RCA tape cartridge. https://archive.org/details/Revoluti1958 starting at 7:44 I didn't realise how advanced it was with Auto-Reverse, Auto Shutoff and spool locks, in a cassette that came out four years before Philips Compact Cassette The only downside was the size which looks to be similar to a VHS tape.
