What are you talking about? The walkman was the first portable tape player commercially available.
Also what Google brought that Altavista didn't have was that it actually returned relevant results, not pages of spam where webmaster cranked as many keywords as they could (including "Pamela Anderson", always).
I was talking portable players, not cassette tapes specifically. There were various options for tape, and 8-track and the like before the Walkman, all of which were portable and played music but none in the way that made the Walkman take off, obviously.
Also what Google brought that Altavista didn't have was that it actually returned relevant results, not pages of spam where webmaster cranked as many keywords as they could (including "Pamela Anderson", always).