Today, exactly 30 years ago on 1 July 1979, Sony launched a gadget that would change the way we listen and appreciate music – the Walkman!

Although I’m almost the same age as the Walkman, I can clearly remember when I first owned my own.  It was on my birthday in 1986.  A white Sony Walkman. And as an added bonus to my present – a Bonny Taylor tape.  I spend the next few months listing to “Faster than the speed of light” over and over and over. Until the tape was so warn out, that you could hardly recognised Bonny’s voice….

Since Nobutoshi Kihara, Sony engineer, has sketched out designs for the Walkman by hand, a lot has changed. The Walkman has since been overtaken by an icon of the digital age – the iPod.

BBC recently asked a 13-year-old, Scott Campell, to swap his Apple gadget for a vintage Walkman for a week.  His friends, he said, “couldn’t imagine their parents using this monstrous box”. It also took him three days “to figure out that there was another side to the tape”. “I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette,” he added.

Some interesting facts about the Walkman:

• Sony sold 30 000 Walkmans in the first two months after its launch, and 50 million within a decade.
• Today total sales of the Walkman have reached 385 million around the world, including newer digital models that use flash memory.
• The initial reaction to the Walkman was poor. Many retailers thought that a cassette player without a recording mechanism had little chance of success.
• Sony initially planned to call the machine “Soundabout” in the United States and “Stowaway” in Britain, but changed its mind after hearing that children in Europe were already asking their parents for a “Walkman”.
• In 1986 the name was included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Reference – News24.com [ Full article ]