Attention, the 160 million or so owners of an Apple iPod MP3 player: take out those white earbuds and listen for a second. Before the iPod became ubiquitous — way, way before — there was the Walkman. The portable cassette players, first introduced 30 years ago this week, sold a cumulative 200 million units, rocked the recording industry and fundamentally changed how people experienced music. Sound familiar? (See TIME's list of the most influential gadgets and gizmos.) The Walkman wasn't a giant leap forward in engineering: magnetic cassette technology had been around since 1963, when the Netherlands-based electronics firm Philips first created it for use by secretaries and journalists. Sony, who by that point had become experts in bringing …show more content…
Originally the Walkman was introduced in the U.S. as the "Sound-About" and in the UK as the "Stowaway," but coming up with new, uncopyrighted names in every country it was marketed in proved costly; Sony eventually decided on "Walkman" as a play on the Sony Pressman, a mono cassette recorder the first Walkman prototype was based on. First released in Japan, it was a massive hit: while Sony predicted it would only sell about 5,000 units a month, the Walkman sold upwards of 50,000 in the first two months. Sony wasn't the first company to introduce portable audio: the first-ever portable transistor radio, the index card-sized Regency TR-1, debuted in 1954. But the Walkman's unprecedented combination of portability (it ran on two AA batteries) and privacy (it featured a headphone jack but no external speaker) made it the ideal product for thousands of consumers looking for a compact portable stereo that they could take with them anywhere. The TPS-L2 was introduced in the U.S. in June …show more content…
(Its insistence for several years on sticking to a proprietary digital music format, ATRAC, left it far behind Apple's iPod in terms of market share.) Since its launch, Sony has released more than 300 different models across all formats; it currently makes Walkman-branded MP3 players, phones and even portable DVD players. Its newest device, the Walkman NWZ-X1000, features a 3-inch OLED screen, 32 gigabytes of memory and WiFi connectivity. But the company still makes play-only cassette Walkmen, too — its latest model to be released in the U.S. was the WM-FX290 in