The UX of cassettes was very useful for sharing and swapping music or speech, and for resuming where one left off. Because of the linear tape, the cassette's "playback cursor" was stateful and independent from whether the medium was read-only or not. Playback resumed at (nearly) the same spot as it was last stopped, even if moved to a different player. Successor formats didn't have this property.<p>Interestingly, Sony emulated the auto-resume feature in some Discman CD players, and later it became common in car CD players, but there was no way to maintain playback position after swapping players. Later, MP3 players maintained their own playback state, but getting tracks on or off the device's built-in or removable storage was with file-based interfaces that connected to computers.<p>This stateful cursor functionality is only returning these days with URLs to media-hosting sites that accept timecode parameters.
Fond memories of Sony and the Walkman era. I worked part time for Sony from the mid to late 1980s while I was a student, paying tuition bills. It was a dream job for a consumer electronics nerd and budding AV enthusiast, getting to demo and play with everything. Sony was still king of CRTs with XBR line of Trinitrons consistently on top. (Back breakers to move across a room, BTW.) Their ES family of audio amps and reference CD players were generally well respected. Meh for speakers.<p>But back to Walkmans ... it was really eye-opening how multiple times per year they would release new variations in size and materials and features or just colours, and people would line up or pre-pay to get their hands on them. People who already had Walkmans, often. The brand loyalty was mostly deserved IMO, because Sony was really doing some original R&D.<p>Personal faves ... compact models in the drop & waterproof Sports line, especially when issued in non-yellow. The solar model was weird, and not super effective, but damn Sony was trying.[1] The metal, and great-sounding Boodo Khan with supplied headphones was also pretty slick.[2] But from a materials and engineering POV there were some gorgeous delicate little metal-body units and at least one was actually the same size as a plastic cassette case itself.[3] (It would expand slightly when you inserted your media.)<p>Long after I left Sony I tried to keep the brand faith with MiniDiscs for years. But the MD's time has also come and gone...<p>[1] <a href="http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-f107" rel="nofollow">http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-f107</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/dd-100" rel="nofollow">http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/dd-100</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-10" rel="nofollow">http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-10</a>
Although The Walkman was released 40 years ago, Sony had actually made something that will look familiar another 10 years earlier and was used on Apollo moon missions: <a href="https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/5254hjpg" rel="nofollow">https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/5254hjpg</a>
<a href="https://www.sony.net/Fun/design/history/product/1960/tc-50.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.sony.net/Fun/design/history/product/1960/tc-50.h...</a><p>Incidentally, I only discovered this recently after hearing the Apollo 11 astronauts use one to play a prank on mission control while on the way back to earth. You can hear this at the amazing <a href="https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/" rel="nofollow">https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/</a> (definitely works best on desktop not mobile)
The Walkman is a classic case of how an entrenched competitor with deep pockets couldn't really stand in the way of an innovative product. I point this out because, whenever you come across an idea for a startup, you'd inadvertently find one or more businesses already built around the idea, sometimes with ginormous funding or income. Remember how iPod beat Walkman, Firefox gazumped IE, Zoom sped past WebX, stripe pocketed payments: Find the key pain points and try to solve them. Don't turn a blind eye [0] no matter how difficult they might be to solve, you wouldn't know it until you try.<p>To quote mittermayr from a recent thread [1]:<p>> <i>Don't throw away an idea because someone else has already made it. People completely underestimate the amount of money you can make as a runner-up, or even as a 5th or 10th-place service in some markets. Most of the products I'm involved with have made me quite substantial amounts over the years compared to the minimal time required to upkeep them. There's at least ten companies I can name at an instant that do almost exactly the same, yet I still make money doing the very same thing.</i><p>> <i>Appreciate the invaluable advantage a market-proven idea brings and focus on whatever its target audience lacks or loves most about the most-popular offering. It doesn't mean you have to copy something (where's the fun in that), but consider this if you start working on something and then come across someone who's done the exact same thing with good success. Don't give up, use it.</i><p>[0] <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html</a><p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19164873" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19164873</a>
A mid-80s Walkman is central to one of my earliest vivid memories.<p>Among the gifts I received for my 9th birthday in 1986 were (1) An AM/FM radio Walkman (replete with the classic orange-padded on-ear headphones), and (2) a plastic kite with an eagle on it.<p>The following day, I walked over to the park nearest our house, stood in the middle of an open sports field, tuned my Walkman to the relatively new Australian rock music station EON-FM, and launched my eagle kite.<p>Fairly soon, as I stood there proudly flying my kite on what was a solidly windy day, the radio playlist transitioned into the intro to Money for Nothing by Dire Straits.<p>To this day, I can still feel the visceral sensation of the buildup of that intro and the sound explosion of that opening guitar riff, and in that moment I knew what rock'n'roll music was all about.<p>I sometimes think back to that just-turned-9-years-old kid in the middle of that field, flying that kite and having his mind blown by rock'n'roll blasted through his brand new Walkman, and think "you're doin OK kid."
The complete genius of the Walkman was that it featured two headphone jacks. Such a simple design decision, with such large ramifications. In total, the Walkman is a classic example of a disruptive industry: creating new industries and killing (or at least mortally wounding) old ones. I remember how terminally moribund the industry-controlled pop charts had become before mix tapes became a thing.
One super useful feature was "Auto Reverse", allowing you to listen to both sides of a tape without having to take the cassette out and flipping it. It came out 3 years later, eg in the Sony WM-7.<p>One thing I learned while looking into this now is that Music Cassettes (MC) have the magnetic recording tape, and then at both ends a "leader", which is much stronger than the thin magnetic tape, so it doesn't break when the end is reached. Furthermore, the leader is transparent, unlike the magnetic tape, and so auto reverse could be triggered by an optical sensor (this website claims that the WM 7 had an optical sensor - I thought Walkmen (Walkmans?) triggered auto reverse from the mechanical pull when the tape reached the end.)<p><a href="http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-7" rel="nofollow">http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-7</a><p>EDIT to add: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#Tape_leaders" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#Tape_leaders</a>
Don't forget the MiniDisc format that Sony also released years later under the "Walkman" brand - for a while there it was an audio storage format and playback hardware that briefly seemed ahead of its time. Sony, if nothing else, were technical innovators during their best days. You knew the gear wasn't imagined and designed by a bunch of bean counters.
Remember the cool kid having a Dual Deck stereo to make mixtapes. Having a rats nest of tape when one failed.<p>Then that evolving into whoever had good internet and a CD Burner. Eventually almost 'renting' music by returning a CD-RW with a new request list. Just how much Discmans would skip with Burnt CD's versus Legitimate ones.<p>To spending $500 on a 128mb MP3 player. Compressing Mp3's into tiny WMA's.
My first walkman was a WM-22, not that much smaller than the first model. My last was a WM-150, which was just a few mm larger than the actual tape in each direction. It felt amazingly elegant.<p>(Took me a while to find out the model numbers by looking at image searches... Sony always had the worst product "names".)
Walking with music has completely changed my life. Can't imagine the amount of ideas I've had and steps I've taken listening to music. With music I can cross the entire city on foot and more.<p>footnote: do you remember when your batteries were running low and the cassette would start slowing down the music? ;)
The article links to a very funny video of today's kids trying to figure out a Walkman:<p><a href="https://www.stereogum.com/1675629/watch-kids-try-to-use-a-walkman-for-the-first-time/video/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stereogum.com/1675629/watch-kids-try-to-use-a-wa...</a><p>It's surprising to see how challenging the Walkman UI is to a complete novice.
I remember after they came out with portable CD players, at first lacking any sort of skip protection it was pretty much unusable for any action sports.<p>At the time I enjoyed snowboarding at a local ski hill and I used my Walkman well into the life cycle of CDs making remixes of all my favorites tracks off CD's onto one cassette to listen to for the snowboarding session.<p>Best part, no skipping! (This was around 1997)<p>Some of the later Anti-Skip that was like 45-60 seconds would be doable, unless you are going over some moguls but for cruising without much hopping/tricks I'm sure some Anti-Skip in the 30s range would have sufficed.
>It’s weird to think that, in the years before the Walkman, there was no way to listen to music privately while out in public. There were ways to bring music with you — on transistor radios, on boom boxes, on car stereos — but they forced you to subject everyone around you to that music, as well.<p>No, the mono earpiece was a common thing with many transistor radios from the 60's. They didn't have stereo, no, so they didn't accomodate 2-ear pods or headphones.
This will probably get buried but does anyone remember having to flip the tape over and the experience associated with the album in doing that? For example, on Metallica's Black Album, it ends on the first side Don't tread on me and then starts on the second side wtih Through the Never. If you dont know about the tape flip, you dont appreciate the beggining of "through the never" IMHO.
What is the current state of the art for music?<p>DVD-Audio was barely a thing ten or so years ago. After buying a B&W Zeppelin Air I was signed me up for their Society of Sound with very high quality 5Gb audio files for an album. My Zeppelin has since died. Is audio quality still improving binaural tracks?<p>The only time I’ve been really aware of audio quality was playing a Blu-Ray of an episode of Madmen.
Also this is how we saved batteries: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk8v9Ijp1So" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk8v9Ijp1So</a>
Retrospectively, I'm very impressed by the mechanical quality. I remember the compartment latch failing on some (non-Sony devices), but never the actual core drive, an this is with thousands of hours of usage.
Man the early Walkman was a magical device. I got a latter one and mine was barely larger than an audio cassette case.<p>The only access to music I had was from a friend whose older brother copied a seemingly random collection for us to have. Vangelis, The Violent Femmes, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Warren Zevon. I think I listened to the same eight cassettes for most of the following year.
When I was in a record store a couple of months ago, three things occurred to me.<p>The resurrection of vinyl and the health of that market makes sense to me.<p>The death spiral of the CD worries me (my preferred format).<p>The fact that people are still buying cassettes mystifies me. Poor sound quality, low res art, serial access only, and quick degradation?
Though I remember its introduction well, what struck me was <i>how much copy</i> there was in that ad.<p>I think of textful ads as having faded out in the 60s (just look at the long essays that were ads from the 40s or 20s!) but really: would you read an ad in a magazine with that wall of text?
I feel it's time for boomboxes to come back. Not purple medicine-pill bluetooth players, but big ol' boxes you can put on your shoulder and Fight the Power with 8" speakers. There was a whole movement around playing music <i>out</i>, now we just inject it into our ear canals.<p>Nostalgia... or genius?
I have a D6C Walkman Pro -- bought in, I think, 1990 -- that still works (or did last I tried it, anyway, maybe a couple of years ago). Great little deck; with metal tape and Dolby C, did a fine job recording CDs.
The problem with pioneers is that , they rarely move to next level, may be due to the thinking that "whatever" they have today just rocks and will "probably" rock tomorrow.<p>Few Examples :<p>Nokia missing the Android boat - thinking Symbian was great
Windows missing the Mobile operating system boat - thinking Windows Phone OS was great
Sony missing the iPod boat - thinking , hey we got Walkman , what else you need.<p>And the list goes on. A truly remarkable product always sees the end , if the visionaries are not ready to foresee whats next.
I recall my brother coming back from a trip to Japan with a top end Walkman in the early 90's. It was seemed to be all metal and so small. Was a mechanical work of art.
Sony always seemed to be the premium or status brand when it came to consumer electronics, everything from portable music players to televisions and VCR's.<p>They always had competition from brands like Sharp, Pioneer, RCA, Magnavox, but I think the big hit came when the really cheap brands started to flood the market. Sony had the Discman come down to $99 for $349, but buyers were still going for the $39 units from Craig, Koss, Sanyo and such.
The amount of innovation that has happened in the space in 40 years is just amazing to me.<p>From having to carry around boxes of cassette tapes that now fit in a small 2mm chip, to the wireless headphones with individual Bluetooth pairing that can recognize speech, to the live streaming of not just songs but music videos while on a moving train, makes me wonder how far we've progressed in such little time.
> There were ways to bring music with you — on transistor radios, on boom boxes, on car stereos — but they forced you to subject everyone around you to that music, as well.<p>...and thanks to the Bluetooth speaker that era is back. Can't tell you how often I'm hiking or running in the mountains and some group's dreadful taste in music precedes them by a half mile.
And I still have one that works. Big fat latching switches that you can activate blindly in the pocket of your jacket, a output that can actually drive headphones properly, ...<p>Sometimes I have the feeling we didn’t really move forwards in terms of interface design.
There're many songs I still listen to, that I listened on my walkman-clone. In most of them I can still "hear" the moment where the cassette stopped and I had to turn it around for the remainder of the song.
disclaimer: listening to music using headphones while bike riding, roller-skating or skiing is now strongly discouraged (still acceptable while taking a walk or unglamorously using public transportation however).
I loved the RadioShack tape recorder. I used it as a little portable boombox that could play in my backpack and create a little sound bubble that would accompany me and my friends.
Wow. That is really a major milestone. It change the scene. And also our view on Japanese hardware innovate culture (seems not software sadly). I love mini-disc more though.