The Sony Walkman has been around for 45 years – here’s why it’s still the most iconic gadget of all time
If you show almost anyone under the age of 25 a cassette tape and ask them what they think it does, they’ll stare at you blankly as if you’ve just asked them to open a can of beans with a flip-flop. But with the original Sony Walkman – the Sony TPS-L2 – turning 45 today, it’s time to recognize it for what it is: the most iconic gadget of all time.
If there’s one thing Gen Z likes, it’s the overuse of the word “iconic,” but in this case it’s completely deserved. Cassettes had been around since the early 1960s, developed by Philips as a much more convenient alternative to vinyl and reel-to-reel tape, but it wasn’t until Sony launched the TPS-L2 in 1979 that the little plastic rectangles really came into use. their right. their own.
The advent of the Walkman meant that you no longer had to sit at home or in the car to listen to music that wasn’t chosen by a radio DJ – now you could do it on the go. And that concept is still all around you, 45 years later.
Freestyle on the backseat
The Walkman is five years older than me, but when I knew what it was, they were everywhere. At home my parents listened to vinyl, but in the car we listened to tapes: Genesis, Gerry Rafferty, Paul Simon’s Graceland and other things that didn’t start with a ‘G’.
However, as I got older I wanted to listen to my own cassette tapes, so my parents bought me a cheap Aiwa portable cassette player. Sure, it wasn’t a Walkman, but by that point almost every other consumer electronics brand had jumped on the bandwagon – and that’s when you know you’re on to something good.
This black plastic box changed car rides for me (even though it made everyone sound like Barry White when the batteries started dying, which didn’t take long). I no longer had to listen to whatever my parents put on, I could sit in the back and play one of the mixtapes I made by recording stuff off the radio.
How many?
The original Sony Walkman TPS-L2 sold for 33,000 yen / $150 / £219 in 1979, or about $650 / £1,050 in today’s money. A working model today fetches about $500 / £500 on eBay.
Thanks to my ‘Walkman’ – it didn’t matter what brand, all portable cassette players were called Walkman at the time – I was able to develop my own musical taste.
When I was 10 and on holiday to Menorca with the family, one of the older children was listening to a tape around the pool with Forget it by Nirvana. It was the summer of 1994 and Kurt Cobain had only died a few months ago, so, rather tragically, his band was bigger than ever.
My parents didn’t play that kind of music and I had never heard it on the radio. When I borrowed the tape one afternoon, I was very impressed.
The soundtrack of your life
The Walkman not only changed the way people listened to music in a practical sense, it also allowed you to transform public spaces into private spaces. You could shut out the world around you by simply putting on a pair of headphones and pressing play. In most public spaces today, those who don’t do that are often in the minority.
What they said…
When the Sony Walkman TPS-L2 was launched in 1979, Sony co-founder Akio Morita said, “This is the product that will satisfy young people who want to listen to music all day long. They will take it with them everywhere.” He was right, and the Walkman became a precursor to the modern smartphone.
The very first TPS-L2 model actually came with two headphone jacks, but no one used the second one because listening to music on a Walkman was seen as something very individual.
Intriguingly, it also had a button that would activate a microphone so you could hear what was going on around you, much like the transparency feature you get on the best Bluetooth headphones these days. But that too was quickly abandoned as people wanted to be able to retreat into their own world undisturbed.
Suddenly you could choose the soundtrack for almost every moment of your life, whether it was watching the sunset from a train window, listening to Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden or stomping through the streets to Napalm Death after a bad day at work, everything would become just that little bit more cinematic.
Considering how inextricably linked sound and place can be, and especially the memories associated with certain songs, making music fully portable has completely changed what it means to us.
In 1984, Sony even released the WM-F5 – a Walkman model that came with a more rugged, splashproof chassis and in-ear headphones (most other models came with on-ears), so you could use them while working out and pumping inspiring tunes straight into your ears.
Yellow fever
The WM-F5 also came in bright yellow, which brings us to another major effect the Walkman had on the world of technology: fashion.
The Walkman was one of the first technology products to place almost as much emphasis on aesthetics as on functionality (though no one ever batted an admiring glance at my fat Aiwa). Owning a Walkman was a lifestyle choice, something Sony was keen to emphasize in its advertising, and it remained so long after CDs replaced tapes, MiniDiscs replaced CDs, and MP3s replaced everything.
The Walkman name is so powerful, in fact, that it transcends not just product generations, but even physical formats. Sony switched to Discman for the CD era – it’s a good thing baggy jeans were in fashion in the ’90s, because fitting one into a pocket was a challenge – but it quickly realized that it wasn’t the type of media its products played that mattered so much as the sense of freedom that the Walkman embodied.
I stuck with the Walkman during the relatively brief but beloved MiniDisc era, and I have fonder memories of my Sony Ericsson W880i Walkman phone than of any smartphone I’ve owned since. But by then, the far more intuitive and user-friendly iPod had arrived on the scene and taken over as my portable media player of choice.
That fourth-generation iPod I bought when I was in college wouldn’t have existed without the Walkman, and there’s no denying that Apple’s slim white jukebox changed the world of technology. But the Walkman changed the whole world.