Almost skipped over this one, at a glance I thought it was some kind of chunky transistor radio of the "Columbus" brand, but then I saw the buttons and the HITACHI, the Columbus is just some sticker.
This is a cool little mono tapecorder thingy. Very clean "leather" (?, I think it might be real) case, no smells. Who knows what I can do with this, I don't feel like powering it up, but as a tchotchke? Wonderful!
Oh and it was 8$. I think this thing is worth maybe 20-25$ + shipping, considering I got no accessories and the battery cover is missing, it's fair. You can't notice it's missing with the case on.
It was probably a dictation machine similar to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_TC-50
I'm not sure why it took a decade for the brain wave of the Walkman to happen, perhaps pre-recorded tapes were still very expensive and/or sounded like anus before better formulations, noise reduction, and things like HX Pro. It also appears making quality heads for compact cassette took a while.
Tape was super expensive compared to vinyl for tape that sounded as good and while there were portable vinyl and reel-to-reel machines nobody was carrying one around with it on. At the time of the TC-50 the general consensus was that you couldn’t make a cassette that sounded as good as a reel-to-reel or vinyl because it would be too big. There were compromise formats like Elcaset and 8-Track, but they had their own fallings and were both quite large compared to compact cassette. It wasn’t until the middle of the 70s that the price and the quality of 1/4 in tape hit a place where it was able to start supplanting vinyl and larger reel-to-reel formats.
Cassette is 1/8 of an inch, reel to reel is 1/4 inch.
8-tracks are 1/4 in, reel-to-reel existed in several sizes.