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Sony Music Hardware Technology

Slashdot Asks: What Do You Remember About the Sony Walkman? (theverge.com) 166

Posted by BeauHD from the blast-from-the-past dept.
On July 1st, 1979, Sony revolutionized the way we listen to music when it released the iconic Walkman TPS-L2, the first real portable music player. "Boomboxes and portable radios had been around for a while, but the Walkman made portable music private, ushering in a whole new era of people listening to music away from home," writes Chaim Gartenberg for The Verge. The Walkman stood the test of time by continuing to sell well even through the CD era. "[It] would go on to see numerous hardware iterations over the years, including 'Discman' CD models and MiniDisc players, as well as more modern portable media player devices that Sony still sells today," writes Gartenberg. It wasn't until Apple unveiled the iPod in 2001 and digital downloads began to dominate that Walkman sales started to plummet.

What do you remember about the Sony Walkman? Do you have any fond memories of the music player that are worth sharing? Let us know in a comment.
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Slashdot Asks: What Do You Remember About the Sony Walkman? More

Slashdot Asks: What Do You Remember About the Sony Walkman?

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  • That I couldn't afford one (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @06:43PM (#58857802)
    and had to settle for the $10 knockoffs that ate batteries years later. I did eventually get a Phillips cassette player that was insane. I could get 6 hours of playtime out of 1 rechargeable AA.

    • Same here (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @06:46PM (#58857824)

      When I was a kid we didn't have enough money for a walkman, what I could afford was the same kind of $10 knockoff as you used...

      Something really sad was the day someone broke the window of my car to get to the $10 player, which maybe they could sell for a $1 used??? Probably not. But it was something like $60 for a new window, that really sucked.

      I don't understand why poor people prey on each other, at the time I drove a really crappy looking car, I thought I'd be fairly safe from crime. Nope, on that day I learned criminals are just assholes to all.

      • When I was a kid we had to play our walkman to school uphill. Both ways.

        • And we had to record our own music, there was no napster or even itunes, there was just the radio with DJs that yakked for ages before finally playing the charts, and we were sitting there hoping that they'd even play the song that we're looking for, and we didn't know what chart position we'd be aiming at because there was no internet where you could look up what position your song would be, and then they played it and you hit record on the tape, only to find out that you hadn't wound it to the right spot

          • We had to sing them ourselves using only the notes A to E. We couldn't afford F and G hadn't been invented yet.

      • because if they step outside their little hell holes to prey on anyone else the cops come in and bust everybody's heads. Back in the 90s there were riots after Rodney King got beaten up by a horde of white cops. The rioters only trashed their neighborhoods and everyone said it was 'cause they were just bad people looking to riot. The actual reason is the Los Angeles PD surrounded the neighborhoods in riot gear and arrested any rioter trying to leave. What they did _not_ do is move in and suppress the riots.

        • Legalize MJ and you'll suddenly find half of our prisons empty! Now where's the money in that?

        • Better if white LA officers streamed into poor minority neighborhoods and fill dozens of buses with hundreds if not thousands of young minority men and carried them off to jail?

          If they want to destroy their own neighborhood, let them.

          Same logic applied - to lesser extent - in Ferguson, MO and more recently Baltimore, MD.

          • arrested the black kids, and then gave them minor citations. If need be the governor can step in with pardons until the 3 strikes crap laws can be changed.

            Soccer Hooligans should be treated like Soccer Hooligans; minor citation, tell them not to do it again and move in with programs to address poverty.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          What they did _not_ do is move in and suppress the riots.

          Because that would endanger their lives.

          It's easy to trash the cops on not going into an active riot, but that's the absolute worst thing you do because you've got an unpredictable crowd that in effect is itching for a fight. Since there are more rioters than police, it's not a winnable situation. And entering the area could also inflame the situation, making it worse.

          The best you can do is surround the rioters, let them destroy the area they're in (

      • By the 90s the real Walkman wasn't that expensive and my parents surely could've afforded it but not me, so I went through a few shitty Chinese attempts too. Mostly they chewed through batteries and tapes like crazy and sounded bad too (flutter and all kinds of noise). One though had a built-in speaker which was cool as hell as I could blast my music like from a tiny boombox.

        Eventually though I did get a real Sony walkman for birthday or another occasion. Unfortunately it was lost or stolen on some vacation

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rossdee ( 243626 )

      I has a Panasonic personal stereo auto-reverse cassette player. It had a built in radio but I preferred to listen to tapes I had compiled. I would buy music on cassette and record the best songs onto HiFi videotape then transfer back to cassette

    • My knockoff one cost $25 of my local dollars, and sounded like it too.
      I was still pretty proud of it however. My Grandfather gave me a set of rechargeable batteries and a charger which made it affordable to use.
      I wore out my copy of The B-52s on that thing.

    • My Mum and Dad had to buy me a cheap Chinese knock-off about 18 months aftert the Walkman appeared.

      The weirdest thing was that when I got it I had no music of my own, I had no tapes as I had no reason to own my own music 'cos whenever I listend to music I always listened to with my Mum and Dad in the car or at home. When I first got a cassette player of my own I still listened to my parent's 60s collections, mostly guitar rock like The Ventures and The Shadows and a lot of Country and Western ( my parents w

    • They were pretty expensive, but worth the price. Only a few kids in our school could afford the genuine Sony Walkman, the rest had to make do with the cheaper brands. I had a pretty good little repair business going, fixing walkmans for school mates for a small fee + parts. The most common issue was loose solder joints on the headphone jack, after that broken cheap plastic internal parts, or a tape jam. Thankfully we had a nice consumer electronic store where I could order parts for almost any brand. B

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The early Walkman models were very expensive. Japan is seen as a proving ground for new technology, for some reason they are willing to spend lots of money on new tech that might turn out to suck. The early Walkman had all kinds of features, like a built in mic and dual headphone sockets.

      Sony knew that others would come to saturate the low end of the market so they pretty much ignored it. Walkman was always positioned as a premium brand that wouldn't chew up your tape. They were actually quite well engineer

  • Play button (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The play button and how nice to feel physical mechanisms lock into place.

  • I remember being the coolest motherfucker on the bus, with my headphones and Walkman. Jamming out while everyone else talked about nothing, trying to pass the time. Weird to think how young the concept of portable music is and how far we have come.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      I remember being the coolest motherfucker on the bus

      Whenever I got something cool, bullies took it away and broke it or kept it. I got the "cool" brand of pants one day and they rubbed me against the bricks like a chalkboard eraser and tore them the first day I wore them. My mother wanted to sue them but I told her that would make bullying worse.

      I learned to be bland and blend in as a nobody. It's safer. So you didn't get to date super-models; the quirky ladies are plenty of fun. Mainstream is boring anyho

  • That is what's most important.

    Let us pay...

    • Since it couldn’t record, they were probably okay with it especially if you had to buy cassettes in addition to records for the same album.

    • Re:What did the RIAA think of it? (Score:5, Funny)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @07:03PM (#58857922)

      Let us pay...

      Back in the 70's in the US everyone had a cassette deck, and would tape albums for their friends.

      The RIAA came up with an ad campaign screaming, "Home Taping is Killing the Record Industry!"

      Then the stoners that I used to hang out with twisted that around into, "Home Fucking is Killing the Prostitution Industry!"

    • RIAA got their thirty pieces of silver with every sale of a blank cassette. I believe they originally sued to block the sale of cassettes and/or recorders. Samo with blank video tapes.

  • This past weekend, Walkman and 13 Y/O (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lecithin ( 745575 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @06:53PM (#58857864)

    Over the weekend I had a birthday gathering for my child. One of the overnight camping guests was a 13 y/o boy. He brought his Walkman and huge collection of vintage tapes that were really my style of music. He gets his tapes from garage sales.

    Although he also brought other electronic devices, he gave me hope for the next generation that they can still use other things as we did.

    • Hope because he brought a walkman? This just seems like a retarded thing to say...you're basing a generation based upon their ability to use antiquated, shitty old technology that's been replaced 2-3 iterations of new tech over? That's like your fucking grandparents saying they based their hope on you because you knew how to hitch a horse up to a buggy. Can't you base hope for the next generation on something more meaningful, like how they CAN pickup really new technology like it's nothing. No training, no

  • Professor's comments . . . (Score:3)

    by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @06:54PM (#58857874)

    One of a more outspoken professor at my university was quoted in the school newspaper as saying:

    "The people wearing these things seem to believe that life needs a soundtrack".

    . . . and even better:

    "I think that they are trying to jump start their brains in the morning".

  • The thing I remember about the Walkman was that hardly anyone could afford the things. They were expensive- or seemed that way at the time- so the people I knew got the knockoffs.

    The only person I knew who owned the genuine model was my aunt, who was just the kind of well off, sophisticated consumer who would get the very best. And the were an impressive feat of engineering. Hers would actually retract when you took the tape out so it was barely bigger than the tape was.

  • Got one just before college and carried it with me most of the time. I was always on foot, and having music as I walked around campus was nice, though the batteries ran out a lot and I'd keep forgetting to replace them.

    Summers the Walkman was more important. I had a data-entry job one year, first in a pool with a bunch of middle-aged women and then by myself in the second shift. I invested in rechargeable batteries and made sure they were fresh before every shift. The next few summers I had more interesting

  • That is was too expensive for young me (Score:4, Informative)

    by 50000BTU_barbecue ( 588132 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @07:01PM (#58857912) Journal

    All I could afford was one of those cheap plasticky Candle players that could only play and fast forward the tape; the supply-side spindle was just a plastic post. To rewind I had to flip the cassette over.
    I miss that stupid thing, it was the first time I listened to music with headphones which was a strange experience. I remember my Tangerine Dream and Jean Michel Jarre tapes.
    Only a few years later I was able to afford the Sony MZ-1 Minidisc Walkman.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    That thing was awesome, huge, bulky, heavy, and made the coolest noise when ejecting the disc. People would be intrigued by the thing.
    I miss being on the cutting edge.

  • I remember it going through AA batteries very quickly -- it needed a new set of batteries after playing just a few cassettes.

  • It's my primary MP3 player (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jader3rd ( 2222716 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @07:10PM (#58857966)
    A Sony Walkman is my current MP3 player. It's great.
  • Aesthetics and Performance. A Hallmark of the Sony brand for always. And bedtime songs... I had a Sony with Panasonic headphones when I was old enough to stop being sung to sleep by my parents, but clearly not old enough to not be sung to sleep by something. Loved the feel of a block of metal carved out and filled with practical magic. Loved watching the music being "made"

  • The Piper at the Gates of Sqwawk (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ctrl-d ( 184136 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @07:32PM (#58858076) Homepage

    I was in a band in the early 90's and we spent a fair bit of time on the road. My Walkman was my refuge from the droning sounds of the van and my bandmates. During one leg of a tour, we stopped at a used record shop (they had cassettes too!) and I picked up a used copy of Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. I had never heard it before, but I knew it was Floyd's debut album, and was excited to hear the psychedelic strains of Syd Barrett. I popped the cassette into my Walkman, pressed play, and we were off to the next destination. The opening track started off with a sort of Hellish squeak - it sounded, conceivably, like those Gates opening into an ever-widening breach. The din persisted through the while song. I couldn't wait for that track to end.

    However, the squeak from Hell kept going into track two. And three. By the time I got to the end of the first side, I kind of "got" it - the sound was a thematic element that tied the album together. The tape clicked to a halt, and I opened up the door to flip the cassette over. About that time, the drummer had taken his headphones off (everyone in the van was listening to their own music) and he said to me, "hey man, what the hell is wrong with your Walkman?" I then realized that the new aroma wafting through the van - intermixed with band BO, Dorito fumes, and probably no small measure of auto exhaust - was the smell of my Walkman motor burning up. The screeching noise was the last gasps of my Walkman, not Syd.

    • Love it. Syd Barrett, weird noises. Absolutely.

    • Not Walkman related, but your anecdote reminded me of the first time I played my new "Wish You Were Here" album (which was, coincidentally, a tribute to Syd).

      I placed it on my fine Technics turntable, my Pioneer pumped the music through my Boses, and I was able to drown out the band that was playing downstairs. All was well with the world.

      During the party my papa-san chair was moved and placed on top of the speaker cords. My girlfriend comes along and plops into the chair...just at the point before the actu

  • A close friend, the great drummer Tom Brechtlein [facebook.com] came over with the Walkman shortly after it was released. I remember being fascinated by the fact that it had 2 headphone jacks, which made it very handy for musicians to point out interesting musical passages. As Tom would say, "Listen to this part coming up..."

  • For it's time it was a very small gadget, but had a big sound.

  • I was blown away.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ddtmm ( 549094 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @08:01PM (#58858218)
    I was in awe when I first heard one. A friend of my mom’s had one and let me try it out, and that was it. HAD to have one. I was 14 and had a job as a dishwasher at 3.25/hr. Saved up enough after 2 months to buy one ($299). Best thing to ever happen to me because I learned to be disciplined and that hard work paid off with something I cherished beyond anything I could imagine (that is, at the age of 14...)
    • I keep hearing about how expensive the Sony Walkman was when it was first released, but no one yet had mentioned the dollar amount. Even today, that's fairly expensive for a portable music player, but I was curious how much $299 in 1979 would be in today's dollars. Get this: $299 in 1979 equals $1,109.58 in 2019 (at least according to an online inflation calculator). My first memory of the Sony Walkman was probably in the late 80's to very early 90's. I got one for Chistmas in 1990 and was pretty much blow

  • I remember a few things.

    Buying the case, because otherwise the dust and snow would get inside.

    How recording your own tapes was better than pre-bought tapes, because you could skip past tracks you didn't like and mix in others you liked, especially with the built in Dolby NR. And how different tape media had different sound quality.

    How even though buying rechargeable batteries violated the warranty, it was a very very very good idea and saved a lot of money.

    And that it worked quite well on long bike trips to

  • Being trained on servicing the latest of Sony's cassette-based dictating machines, the BM-12. Sleek and to small. As an aside, there was no domestic market for dictating machines in Japan, just not how they did it. Anyways, I was learnin' these.

    I always walked the city when I got there, and especially going by J&R Music World and 47th St Photo, where all the cool stuff I wouldn't see for 6 months or more back home was right in the windows.

    And I saw it. The TPS-L2. OMG. O. M. G.

    I was skating a lot then,

  • Sorry can you repeat that (Score:3)

    by future assassin ( 639396 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @08:24PM (#58858298)

    I can't hear...

  • The Super Walkman WM-10 [walkmancentral.com] was absolutely amazing. When closed it was actually the size of a cassette tape jewell box.

  • ... so for my birthday as a kid, I instead got what would better be described as a brick. The audio quality in those light headphones wasn't great either. It was nigh unusable.
    I was a little bit jealous of my classmates with Walkmans.

    Instead of using that, I grew up listening to gramophone records, and tapes on my boombox.
    BTW. My brother had Rick Astley's "Never gonna give you up" original on tape.

  • They were rare in Minneapolis until two chaps from Toronto showed up wearing their earphones around their necks as a matter of course.

    Hi, Drew!

    --dave

  • I would walk around the house blasting 80s metal continually, when my mother wanted to speak to me she would walk up, pull one of the headphones to the side a yell my name into my ear.

  • They would say its a terrible idea and will never sell. Just like when the iPod was released.

  • My Dad tuning Mom out. (Score:5, Funny)

    by k2backhoe ( 1092067 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @08:44PM (#58858402)
    My Dad loved classical music and already had a big collection on tape when this came out. He got a Walkman and walked around all day with the headphones on. Every time Mom was about to say something to him she saw the headphones and refrained. It wasn't until weeks later that we kids found out he had no batteries in the Walkman.

  • When boomboxes had every feature (Score:3)

    by karlandtanya ( 601084 ) on Monday July 01, 2019 @08:47PM (#58858418)

    The walkman did one thing and did it very well.

  • "What do you remember about the Sony Walkman? Do you have any fond memories of the music player that are worth sharing?"

    I thought it was pretty dammed expensive for a portable cassette player. But they were pretty popular among other guys on my submarine's crew for listening in their bunks.

  • I had the thin one, about the thickness of a cassette case. It used one AA battery, which lasted almost exactly 2.5 tapes, before they would start to distort. Eventually, it never played the tapes at the correct speed. I loved the form-factor. It fit in the same box slots as the cassettes! Unfortunately, the battery life was so bad, I hardly ever used it.

  • Kept leaving them on the plane or a bus. Couldn't afford anymore and gave up.

  • I could never afford a Sony during high school and had to made do with a Sanyo quad-AA-battery-eating "personal stereo". But when I move to Japan after college I went to Osaka's DenDen Town (like Akihabara) and bought some top-of-the-line Sony Walkman's (Walkmen?) for friends and family. The main differences were:

    1. Made out of metal instead of plastic
    2. Very slick paint jobs - my favorite was the British Racing Green one
    3. Inline remote controls on the headset cable - had buttons, an LCD and a volume contr

  • After a while, envying everybody a lot, I finally got a knockof brand. However, while my friends were walking around with headphones on all the time I found that I didn't like blocking out ambient sounds when out and around. I only used it sitting somewhere, etc. and at home I used my stereo. So it was a bit of a disappointment.

    I'm still like that. Music is only an occasional pleasure. I also prefer reading to audio books because I concentrate better and miss fewer details.

  • This article is a bald-faced attempt by /.'s marketeers to out the boomers.

    Remember to click the "Post Anonymously" button.

  • I took that into the sauna and steam room and it worked just fine.

    But my actual first walkman...was a Zenith. Had a little three number rotating numeric display which you could use to find a certain song on a tape.

  • Biking (Score:2)

    by dcw3 ( 649211 )

    I had a 25 mile route that took ~90 minutes, which was perfect for my autoreversing Walkman to play my mix tape.

    Before someone bashes me for riding and listening to music, I kept the volume low enough to hear traffic.

  • Well, I brought my 1st walkman a couple years after it came out, after saving for it. It stopped working after a week. Bummer. So I brought it back to the store and Sony refused to honor the warranty "you dropped it". But I haden't, I'd been very careful with this prize item. So a year later, when I'd saved enough again, I bought another one and the exact same fucking thing happened. I went into a rage and swore of Sony. To this day, almost 40 years later, I still refuse to purchase anything Sony for being
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Wait until you spend a ride on a bus with someone who feels the urge to share his taste in music with the rest of the riders and you wish he was a more selfish asshole.

  • I even have a few of those in mint condition, these are the ones that gets as small as they came, and have a CRT tube television inside them, fabulous stuff, high resolution too as they were using Cathode ray tubes, which meant the resolution was as good as the TV transmission at the time, 625 line system. You could read the subtitles back in 1980's with these in your pocket.

    Sony wasn't the best at they walkman series, but they were certainly the innovators of the technology. I had a ridiculously expensive

  • I had a non-Sony knockoff for a while but struggled to adjust my listening habits to cassettes and headphones. I just didn't listen to endless music - like my parents it was either the radio or I would deliberately put an album on.

    It was much later than I got it and by then the Walkman of choice was MiniDisc. I had two at different times, one with the original MD format and the other that supported Hi-MD. Both genuine Sony devices. I loved MiniDisc - the best bits of CD combined with the best bits of casset

  • In our little backwater corner of Europe (that's what this was back then), it didn't even arrive until the early 80s. And even then it was insanely expensive. You would easily get a "real" cassette player for the price (actually about half that price), good luck convincing your parents to get one for you.

    Of course I wanted one. Never got one. And nobody I knew got one. But at least we all were equally poor and didn't have to worry about it. Eventually we all got some cheap knockoffs that would maybe, kinda-

  • Unlike the isolation of personal devices today, the Walkman sported TWO headphone jack slots and a mic button to talk. Listening WITH somebody. Now there was a revolutionary idea! It was a great idea until Sony realized that it catered to freeloaders, and nipped that in the bud.

    Also, it came with this insane demo tape that had a jet fly through your head. It was pretty sweet.

  • I recall frequently hearing this song about the Walkman in 1981 when I was in 7th Form. On the rare occasions that I hear it nowadays, it brings back memories of that time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • And then it being defective right after the 90- warranty.

    Then getting a gift of a really nice one. It too being defective. And basically SONY = defective crap to me.

    $120 is a lot of money for a 12 year old kid to save in the 80's.

  • The best Walkman was the size of a cassette tape case (when empty). Insane design for the times.

    To open it, you pulled it slightly apart, then inserted a cassette, closed and played.

    The Walkman fit easily in a large multi-cassette-tape holding carrier bag.

  • I remember it ate batteries if you used the tape player; you'd get like maybe 2 or 3 hours out of a set.

  • My grandmother had a portable cassette player from the 1960s that had an AM radio "cassette" you could put in to hear AM radio.

    Granted it was probably a lot more expensive, but it existed as a retail product people far from rich could afford.

  • I used to ride a motorcycle back in the day and used a Sony Sportsman Walkman to listen to music while riding. By breaking the headset apart I could insert each mini speaker into my helmet and ear; worked great and the Walkman was so tough that one time when it flew off the bike while I was traveling around 80mph; I simply went back, picked it up, dusted it off, plugged it back in and kept on riding and listening. Yes the plastic piece that covers the cassette tape had some damage, but otherwise it surviv

  • It took me a year to convince my parents to buy me one. I recall it was the in thing at grade-school. "Everyone" had one.

    I listened to so much music after that, copying records to tape. I also remember Sharing music and mix tapes. The biggest accessory was a headphone splitter jack so that you could listen with friends!!! Those long family drives or school trips I'd pack extra batteries and just listen. It was freedom.

    Mine was the fancier model that had Auto-Reverse!! Kind of a big honker with room

  • After a thirty foot drop to the asphalt, it would seperate into pieces. Find where the batteries went and put them back in. Find the battery cover and put it back on. Find the tape cover and snap on back into place. Reinsert the tape, press play, and it would WORK. This happened a few times. Mine eventually stopped working when the drive belt broke.

  • If you're old enough to remember it you've forgotten.

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