Until the 1970s, listening to music was considered to be a social activity.
Even the first portable cassette players were suitcase-sized boomboxes with stereo speakers.
It was the first equipment designed for private music listening.
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Sony’s co-founder, Masaru Ibuka, would take it on flights to listen with headphones.
Ibuka remembered hearing about a project aimed at creating affordable 50g on-ear headphones.
This prototype became the MDR-3L2.
The name chosen for the package was Walkman.
Back then, wearing headphones in public was like wearing sunglasses indoors.
Sony employees were then tasked to ride trains using a Walkman to normalize this behavior.
By the end of August, all 30,000 units had been sold.
The next step was launching the TPS-L2 worldwide.
Initially, Sony marketed it under the name Soundabout in the U.S. and Stowaway in the UK.
The belt-clipping Walkman II, launched in 1981, is credited with popularizing the personal stereo worldwide.
From that year onward, virtually every electronics company was selling a Walkman clone.
The Oxford Dictionary even added the word “Walkman” in 1986.
The Walkman itself had several series, featuring options like recording and radio.
Especially famous was the yellow Walkman Sports series, which offered shock and water resistance.
This version capitalized on the aerobics craze of the 1980s, sparked by Jane Fonda’s VHS tapes.
The Sony Walkman WM-AF59 combined auto-reverse cassette playback with an integrated AM/FM radio tuner.
The ordinance is still in place.
The direct drive motor provided stable and accurate tape playback, resulting in superior sound quality.
Its compact, durable design made it a favorite among audiophiles.
Some models featured a quartz-locking mechanism for even greater precision.
The compact cassette was an analog format, so the Walkman couldn’t detect when each song started.
Even if it could, skipping wouldn’t be instant, as the tape had to roll forward.
Duplicating a mixtape was the early physical version of sharing a playlist.
Duplicating a mixtape was the early physical version of sharing a playlist.
These devices offered cleaner sound and precise skipping to the next song.
By far, the most successful of these was the CD-based Discman, launched in 1984.
Early models were also bulky, relying on physical shock resistance mechanisms to prevent skipping during movement.
Later models used a RAM cache for this purpose.
The Sony Discman D-145, a popular portable CD player from the mid-90s.
By 2000, the Discman was rebranded as the CD Walkman.
However, in Japan, the format remained popular well into the 2000s.
The MP3 format was already dominant among users and competitors, but Sony didn’t initially support it.
Once theApple iPodbecame widely available, the entire Walkman brand fell out of favor.
The cassette Walkman was discontinued in 2010 after selling 200 million units.
As a brand, the Walkman outlasted even the iPod.
It’s hard to even imagine the world without the Walkman.
Would headphones have ever become popular?
Would Apple have released the iPod, or would it have remained a premium computer company to this day?
The Walkman had one historical role: to make music portable.
It’s incredible how much more it accomplished.
