The iPod of its Day, Walkman Turns 30

I fondly remember those long summer road trips with my family — the four us strategically crammed into the Chevette, my sister and I inseparable from our Sony Walkman portable cassette players. We always enjoyed stimulating conversation as a family, but long-distance car trips were for zoning out to Michael Jackson, Van Halen, R.E.M., or the Violent Femmes (note the progression of musical tastes through the years) on the headphones. And I'm sure my parents thank Sony to this day for the peace it afforded them on those long, long drives.

What does this trip down memory lane have to do with technology? Why, it's the 30-year anniversary of iPod's ancestor, the Sony Walkman.

It may not look like much — just a tape player, AM/FM radio and plug-in headphones. But in its day, before we were jaded by devices that do everything but bring you coffee in the morning, it represented freedom, enhanced workouts and replaced the way-too-public boom box as the personal music player of choice. Eventually, the CD-playing version would overtake the cassette players and a host of imitators attempted to chip away at Sony's domain. The Japanese company even had a Walkman that played LPs, but a reference to the short-lived artifact could not be found online.

Fast-forward to 2009. The Walkman brand is alive and well, although now it's following Apple's lead. But to forget that Apple originally took a cue from Sony when it launched its then-revolutionary iPod back in 2001 is to deny Sony its important place in electronics history. Like the original Walkman, now the first-generation iPod looks woefully inadequate, but it really goes to show how quickly we forget how cool all of this stuff is when it first comes out.

To show just how quickly things obsolesce, BBC News ran a story by 13-year-old iPod-user (are there any 13-year-olds who don't have an iPod?) Scott Campbell, who traded his iPod for his dad's old Walkman for a week. The biggest takeaway from his experiment is that 30 years (heck, even three years) is an eternity in the world of technology, as Campbell observes:

"When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed ... It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."

I'll bet an even more fascinating experiment would be to send a brand-new iPod Touch back to the year 1979 and observe the pandemonium. Not to get too nostalgic, but perhaps one casualty of the digital age is the death of the album. After all, you pretty much had to listen to the entire album (or at least an entire side), which had its own rewards for some of the more challenging music of the time.

So even though the Walkman as we knew it is dead, it lives on in today's digital gadgetry. Long live the Walkman!