Yesterday it was announced that Sony has halted the production of Walkmen. “This makes sense,” I thought to myself. After all, with the proliferation of mp3s players in today’s market, who needs portable CD players? It was only after reading further that I discovered they were actually talking about the Walkmen that play cassettes<\/b>. <\/p>\n

My reaction was probably the same as yours: “They still make those?”<\/p>\n

When most people think of advances in technology they think of things getting smaller, but during the Awesome 80s, cassette players actually got bigger. Boom boxes (or “ghetto blasters” as we called them) were all the rage. The one I owned was modest in size compared to some of the mammoths my friends owned. One kid in my neighborhood had one that required 8 D-Cell batteries and even had its own disco ball! Throughout the mid-80s, most companies believed that when it came to portable stereos, bigger was better.<\/p>\n

But not Sony. Sony launched the Walkman in 1979, and its selling points were its portability and small size. For the first time, people could take their purchased cassettes (or make their own mix tapes) and listen to them on the go. It was revolutionary at the time.<\/p>\n

Compared to those big boom boxes, the best thing about the Walkman was that it only used a few AA batteries. My friend Jeff and I used to go on road trips to Tulsa (about a two hour drive) in the back of his mother’s van, and I can remember the two of us sitting in the back of that van, each with one side of those cheesy headphones, listening to Motley Crue, KISS and Alice Cooper as we barreled down the road. <\/p>\n

Sony’s CD Walkman — originally dubbed the Discman — was released (believe it or not) in 1984, although our family didn’t own one in until around 1990 or so. In fact, the first two CD players I ever saw in person were owned by my dad, and Jeff. I used my Dad’s Discman a time or two in my car, using one of those cassette adapters to route the audio out of the CD player and into my car’s stereo via the in-dash cassette player. Ah, the joys of placing a portable CD player on a folded up t-shirt on your dash to try and keep the thing from skipping as you drove over pebbles.<\/p>\n

But, I digress. I haven’t thought about cassette Walkmen in twenty years now, about the time I started converting my music library over to CDs from cassettes. I’m surprised to hear Sony kept making them all these years. Maybe they were big sellers in third world countries? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday it was announced that Sony has halted the production of Walkmen. “This makes sense,” I thought to myself. After all, with the proliferation of mp3s players in today’s market, who needs portable CD players? It was only after reading further that I discovered they were actually talking about the Walkmen that play cassettes. My reaction was probably the same as yours: “They still make those?” When most people think of advances in technology they think of things getting smaller, but during the Awesome 80s, cassette players actually got bigger. Boom boxes (or “ghetto blasters” as we called them) were… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}