Happy 40th to the Walkman!

The Original

     I was writing a bloggy bit about Apple in which I was wondering if they had lost their competitive edge in being able to innovate truly exceptional new products. In this regard, I always relate and compare Apple and Sony. They dominated the consumer electronics markets in their heyday with innovative products. The innovation was driven from the top by Steve Jobs at Apple and Akio Morita at Sony. The stream of innovative products at both companies dropped dramatically when the founding icon left the helm.
     In the midst of writing this, an article from USA Today popped up on a news feed informing me that the Sony Walkman was launched on forty years ago on July 1, 1979: Before Apple iPods and iPhones, there was Sony Walkman, 40 years of portable music. This amazing innovation was basically a small cassette player that was either clipped to one’s belt or held in one’s hand and worked exclusively through headphones. There were no speakers. The Sony Walkman was the first personal music player and Sony owned that space until Apple out innovated them with their combination of iPod and iTunes.
     Certainly, people used headphones before the Walkman. The use of headphones was usually on devices or systems that were designed to be played primarily with speakers. People used them at home with the stereo systems that were anything but portable. The headphones themselves weren’t designed with portability in mind. They were big and bulky. Transistor radios, another Sony innovation, made the radio portable but had a low-grade earbud option rather than high quality headphones. Also, with the transistor radio, one was subject to the offerings of the radio stations.
     As far as playing the music you wanted to hear when you wanted to hear it. The options were records and tape. Record were never really portable. The tape players were first reel-to-reel and also not very portable. The innovations of the 8-track and cassette players allowed for players in the car. The cassette format became the standard for two reasons, the tapes were more compact and only had two sides versus the 8-tracks needed to switch directions eight times and disrupting the music in doing so.
     The first truly portable music players were big and loud. They were called “boom boxes” and ranged in size from a cigar box on the smaller end to a case of beer on the large side. They were AM/FM radios and cassette players. There is a recurrent image of movies from the 70s and 80s of folks walking around with boom boxes on their shoulders belting out music at a volume that an entire

My Workhorse Walkman

neighborhood could hear.
     The Walkman was much more portable and much more personal. You could hear someone else’s music only if they turned their volumes up so high you could hear the music from their headphones in their ears. Forty years later, the hearing aid industry is a benefitting from generations of folks listening to loud music on headphones. You could listen to anything you wanted, provided you had the cassettes at hand.
     The original Walkman actually had two headphone jacks. The thinking was that one could walk on the beach or down the street with a significant other both listening to the same music. That was so rarely the case that subsequent models only had one jack. The Walkman was truly a personal, one person, device.
     When first introduced, the Walkman was kind of pricey for the day. When

released in Japan they were selling for $150 and, if memory serves me well, they were about that price when they came to the us a few years later. The price came down in the second iteration. At the party held to celebrate the success of the Walkman, Morita made a challenge to the engineers and designers at the end of the evening. He held a block of wood that was two-thirds the size of the Walkman. He told the engineers that this was the size he wanted the next version to be and it should have half the number of parts and half of the cost. This is the kind of creative tension Morita brought to the table!

My Walkman MiniDisk

When I finally bought one, I paid something like $50 or $60.     When I was traveling a lot for business and commuting from Wilton, CT to Manhattan. I always had a Walkman in my briefcase. First it was a yellow sport version and later the mini-disk Walkman. Mostly, like 90% of the time, I listened to Armenian and Turkish music. About half of that music was live recordings that a group of musician friends would record, duplicate, and share. The Walkman was a big part of expanding our repertoire.

     I have very fond memories of the Walkman but easily gave them up when gifted an iPod. Innovations are really awesome and breed great loyalty until something better comes along.