Cassette Goodbyes: Sony Is Shutting Down Production Of The Walkman
Photo courtesy of edvvc
Slate has a great article on the history of the Walkman. We’re feeling a little sentimental to see Sony shut down production, and we’d like to see the lowly, now-obsolete Walkman get a little credit for the impact it had on how people experience music. Contrast this with how teenagers experience music now.
Consider this: The first Walkman model, the TPS-L2, introduced in the summer of 1979, was equipped with two headphone jacks. Sony’s ads showed pairs of very different people—for instance, a short old Japanese man and a tall, young American woman—both wearing headphones plugged into the same Walkman. The TPS-L2 even featured a button that let the sharers filter out the music for a moment, so they could talk to each other through the headphones.
“Up until the Walkman, listening to music was a shared experience,” Bob Neil, a Sony vice president told me back in 1999, when I was writing a story for the Boston Globe about the player’s 20th anniversary. Nobody could imagine people buying something that would let them listen all alone; the whole notion would surely strike the people around them as “rude.”