Reminds me of how much Sony (along with Braun) shaped Apple’s hardware design language. And that in turn keeps on shaping many others.
And the walkman is arguably one of the classic cases of “build it, and they will come”, where a product was well ahead of what consumers were already calling for. In my mind, that’s the kind of thing actually deserving the visionary label.
I remember feeling like I was living in the future every time I listed to music on my Sony MiniDisc player while friends where still using their portable CD players with easily scratched disks before mp3 players became affordable and ubiquitous in high school.
Not so lucky here. hated minidiscs from the moment I bought a recorder. I got an imported MZ-R90, fairly late into the cycle expecting maturity, which would persistently overheat when recording for some reason. Playback was reliable however but the limited ability to record meant that I only listened to about 5 discs worth of music for about 5-6 years. Prerecorded minidiscs were prohibitively expensive and very limited in availability in the UK as well.
Eventually, as I was stubborn as hell, it got replaced by an iPod shuffle when they first came out. Bar a stupid couple of weeks with an awful Sony Ericsson phone it’s been Apple all the way since.
Freedom from having to maintain and record media is the biggest win though over time, not the hardware. Apple Music saves me hours a week managing music for 5 people in my family.
That was an "ignorance is bliss" time, when everyone was enchanted by the sleek design of the MiniDisc and its players. But once MP3 took off, everyone started talking about lossy compression, and people suddenly realized that the ATRAC codec used in the 1990s MiniDisc players was flawed, and often said to be comparatively poor.
I remember when we were all rocking walkmans/aiwas and just accepted the mediocre sound quality of our mix tapes. CDs were ubiquitous but most portable players were prone to skipping and there was no economic way to create mix tapes on CDs for us. The day I bought a portable Sharp mindisc recoder and created the my first digital CD to Mindisc mix via an optical connection was eye opening. I cannot overstate what a game changer it was in creating portable CD quality mixes.
Quite ironically, these days you can get audio processing plugins for DAWs (digital audio workstations), which lower the quality of your audio to emulate the lower audio quality of cassette tapes.
I remember the kids who had minidisc players. Usually spoiled cause they were expensive and didn't have much prospect for future use, so it took parents who didn't mind wasting money. And typically used it to feel superior to other kids, cause it was different and apparently didn't skip. (My best friend had one, and he was pretty spoiled - we abused it trying to make it skip - they definitely do skip if you hit them hard enough). But kind of disappointed when it came to actually finding music to listen to. While the MiniDisc might have been superior tech, it doesn't really matter if record companies won't produce media for it. I'd make fun of my friend for having a player that didn't skip but not having any music for it.
If I remember correctly, it wasn't the mp3 player that made the MiniDisc a nonstarter format, it was CD burners that came out a few years before mp3 players that actually did it.
It's quite interesting that all both the Thinkpad and the Mac are inspired in different ways from what could broadly be called the 'Japanese aesthetic'.
> And the walkman is arguably one of the classic cases of “build it, and they will come”, where a product was well ahead of what consumers were already calling for.
Indeed, wonder if they used any parts of UX design/research. Was that even such a thing then?
And if you’re old enough, you may have experienced a SW transistor radio With a single mono earpiece giving you that feeling of being real time personally connected to the world far, far away from home. A precursor to the feeling of connecting to a far away BBS (bulletin board systems) and eventually the Internet.
> And the walkman is arguably one of the classic cases of “build it, and they will come”, where a product was well ahead of what consumers were already calling for.
I was born much after its release, but I have to say I find this surprising. Cassette players were popular with car commuters, why wouldn't it have been obvious that they would be with train or bus commuters?
Size and weight, usually 2 or 3 double A batteries and mono sound because intended for a single speaker output. To listen privately you'd have a phone in one ear. Deeply unsatisfactory experience.
Walkman was a huge step forward
I think the solution space is extremely constrained.
What else is there for these devices other than some variation of rectangles and radii.
I swing the other way, I want more choices with greater variance.
If you want something rugged that won't fly out of your hand but also reasonably spec'd, your choices are limited.
Forget anything from Apple.
Ok, you can have a ruggedised case as a clip-on-around extra, but if you want a rugged case with bigger battery and a physical keyboard, forget it.
Today's designs are extremely limited, it's all just a scale of progressively more fragile until you're buying something that looks more like jewellery or a display-case item. Fine China even.
And! The goal posts keep moving. You look at new devices, find something you like and think "okay, I can probably afford a secondhand one of those from two years ago" - nope, doesn't exist.
And the same applies in reverse:
You like the device from two years ago, and are prepared to splurge on new: NOPE! They don't make that combination any more.
It's like a dystopian choose your own adventure.
You can choose from any of the following one bullshit option.
You can buy a ton of iPhone battery cases and get exactly what you want.
As for ruggedness of the device itself - the current devices are way more solid than the first gen big screen devices. Most of them are even waterproof.
If you don't want a big screen, you can buy some phones that will survive anything - check out phones by CAT.
I recently had an opportunity to check out a drive-in movie theatre, and was very excited at the idea until I remembered that the FM radio in our car was messed up (we never use it). I dug through the garage and found my old Walkman still in a pile of high school stuff. Cleaned it up, installed batteries, cycled the volume rheostat until it was cleaned up and the static stopped...and POOF perfect FM radio again! I brought headphones and had a great time.
This was an issue long before 1984. It's shocking by today's standards, but the portable transistor radios dating from the 1950s never received any security updates in their lifetime!
Yes, I confess that I was just riffing on cbm-vic-20's clever comment.
An original Sony Walkman had nothing in it that could ever require a "security update". It had no network access, no wireless connection, and as far as I know no microprocessor, nothing that could ever enable someone to hack into it - unless they had physical access and were skilled at soldering.
Even more so, the transistor radios from the 1950s were just simple circuits with as few as five transistors. Now these were radio receivers, so by modern standards you might worry about someone hacking into them. But with five transistors all soldered together on a simple circuit board, it would be difficult for an attacker to send a signal that would somehow reprogram the radio.
Maybe a lightning bolt though! That could cause a permanent denial of service.
Painfully funny joke. I've got a little chefs steps sous vide that will become worthless the day the company goes out of business and the app is pulled from the store. Despite just needing a temperature and time setting it relies on a phone app and somehow requires an update every single time I use it =/
The authors spoke a common notion on how there exists no valid excuse for the prevalence of "mandatory security updates" for appliances by shedding light on how few (possibly zero) of these gadgets from a bygone era possessed either firmware or the need to "update" it.
NASA Apollo 13 team did intentionally brick S-IVB upperstage radio downlink so that frequency auto-calibration goes way off so it won’t interfere with the rescue operation.
That auto-calibration system probably was a series of analog opamp circuits, so if that’s the case they managed to OTA brick a complex enough analog radio.
Just to be a pedant, the android phone I am typing this on is also made entirely out of electrical and electronic parts as well. In fact, arguably this device contains a greater degree of those parts, as the only electromechanical parts are speakers, a vibration motor, and 3 tact switches.
A simple radio will have a speaker, slide switch for power, potentiometer for volume, and either a potentiometer or variable cap for tuning.
Although I do agree, the operative words there are 'simple' and 'no firmware'. ;)
It would be entirely analogue in the signal path; radios didn't become digital until DAB. Although some acquired microprocessor front panel controls in maybe the 90s.
Way to go. :-) You reminded me, I bought a couple of those little rechargeable FM transmitters recently and was surprised to find that they're so much simpler than Bluetooth in a lot of ways. I haven't used any of my portable BT speakers in a few weeks now, because it's easier to pipe audio from my phone through to a nearby radio.
There's a big community of ambient/electronic musicians that are still using these things. They are popular for recording/playing tape loops and making tape delays. I bought some recently to convert into a makeshift mellotron (they still run ~$15 on ebay!). [1] Also there seems to still be enough demand to fund kickstarters for new fancy cassette players. [2]
I still have a fondness for how the walkman's motors would slow down as the batteries died which caused a slowing of the sound. The beauty of analog. Today's digital equipment stops cold once voltage gets below threshold.
Along the lines of the melotron, I wonder if you could hook up a pot connected to the battery inputs to manually adjust the voltage so you could control this slowing down effect. I could see it working to lower the voltage, but would these things speed up by applying a higher voltage than normal?
Cool link! Regarding music players, I personally switched to simpler/less-costly solutions because I do a lot of hiking and I can get caught in sudden storms or just end up dropping things. Along those lines I tried a lot of agptek devices and they've been really good.
I suggest an external DAC for your phone unless you have very specific requirements; I use a iFi iDSD Nano (which is no longer being made, but there are equivalent models), what's best for you depends on your use case (what kind of headphones or speakers would you use?).
I got myself a WM-701C [0], which was considered to be the pinnacle of Walkman design at the time. Incredibly thin with a 'remote control' in the headphone cord.
Mine was heavily used as I did about 20km/day on a bike ( in NL this is just commute + paper round, nothing special ) for quite a few years.
I had some trouble finding it, but hey on the internet everything exists, the Walkman Archive!
Was the Walkman any better than its competitors? I was only a toddler at the time but a few years later EVERYONE made personal cassette players, at way lower prices than Sony.
But it wasn’t like with a generic “MP3 player”, a generic cassette player wasn’t really missing anything that the Walkman had (except for the very low end models that were in the cheapest price bracket). I remember one model that only had reverse and not fast forward, for example.
I was really into skateboarding from about 12 years old to 30. But back in the day I used to buy the Sony Sport Walkman's. The big yellow ugly ones.
When I would skate I had the Walkman in my left hand at all times. I used to fall a lot and learned to land on the Walkman. It became instinct to cover my glasses with my right forearm and land with my left hand so the Walkman took the hit. For anyone wondering my fingers didn't grip all the way around the Walkman so I didn't grind my fingernails off when I landed.
But those things were tanks. I bought the OG 5GB iPod when it came out and that completely changed the way I skated since I didn't have the trusty Walkman to fall on.
But that was also around the time I started to listen to more Hip Hop like Slick Rick so my entire style changed to a smoother more technical skate compared to when I was listening to Reagan Youth all day and just flinging myself off sets of stairs.
They were the IPhones of the time. More expensive, more fashionable, perceived higher quality, and had innovative features such as auto reverse. The average cassette player was the generic Android in comparison.
Those tiny Aiwas that eventually miniaturized to hardly bigger than a cassette case were a very successful challenger brand in my circles, to the point that Sony brand walkmen practically ceased to exist. It was either an Aiwa or a cheap noname during those last years before everything switched to digital.
But the brand went through that surprisingly unscathed, they might have dropped the ball on late generation cassette innovation, but after the switch to organise CD the Sony brand discman was again perceived as solidly recommendable.
I agree, a lot of the old designs really had something special. I was looking through an old emergency backpack recently and found an Aiwa HS-SP590, similar to a Walkman. For quite a few years it was kind of boring as tech, but now it's so unique that my kids are very intrigued. I'm thinking I'll put something else in the backpack and have a play. (Ideally there weren't any batteries left inside...)
I seem to recall the Aiwas tended to have EQ on the front, sometimes lined up diagonally. My first "Walkman" was a Toshiba (so technically it wasn't a Walkman) model from 1984, one of the first that came with a FM/AM cassette that you had to insert where the tape usually would go. It also was one of the first models with auto-reverse. This little guy: http://www.walkman-archive.com/wa/project/toshiba-kt-as1-bra...
There was a post on HN the other day where the Instagram algo was discussed - look at something once and see it for the next three weeks.
Oddly, at some point it's decided I like to see pictures of old hifi equipment and Walkmans in particular. Turns out there's a massive community of collectors and displayers, and the pictures are actually pretty great.
It also reminded me just how great 'tech' was back then. I was a kid in the 80s and a teen in the 90s and it brought back memories of just how magical it all felt! Technology didn't feel like it was iterating as quickly, and things like a tiny Walkman with tiny earbud headphones playing a tape of a new band your friend had found, in a world that wasn't instant and connected - was everything.
I don't know about where you live, but where I am in Canada the majority of FM radio is as bad or worse than cable television; constant ads, stale "radio friendly" music and DJ's with inane banter and making bad jokes. It's painful to listen to.
I am French and our FM radios are good in average. Some are excellent, some are poor. The distribution is skewed towards good.
I have the same impression when listening to German ones, though I listen only occasionally and just a few stations.
Then going further east, you have the Polish ones which sound unbereable to me, everyone is unnaturally shouting, or behaving in a very unnatural way (I belive this is copied from the US, despite French radios such as FUN betting precursors of modern FM there in the 90's). There are exceptions though, such as Tok FM.
The parent commenter may have meant why not use a low-power FM transmitter for your own mobility needs (source to FM transmitter to any FM radio)? They are cheap and ubiquitous now.
It really depends more on what you're into than where you live since so many radio stations stream.
There are plenty of great radio stations out there still, but on the internet people think it's cool to pretend the stations don't exist and burrow themselves deeper into a more and more Balkanized niche echo chamber, never exploring anything outside of their comfort zone.
FMs I've listened to this week: WXRT/Chicago, KCSN/Northridge, KING-FM-HD2/Seattle, KTNN-FM/Tohatchi, K279BO/Palm Springs.
If you want to hear the same old thing over and over, by all means wallow in Spotify or whatever you loaded onto your iPod a decade ago. I do that sometimes, too. It's comforting.
However, there's a world of good and interesting music out there. You just have to make an effort beyond tapping the play button and letting a computer decide what you hear.
Of course there are some great stations to stream; there is infinite musical content online that I use to great advantage. But we're specifically talking about FM/AM broadcast and the chaff heartily outweighs the wheat in most locations.
I understand that, and all of the stations I listed are broadcast FM, so my point stands: There are plenty of great FM stations, if you bother to look for them instead of wallowing in your already-selected music.
Just because they also stream doesn't mean it's not useful to know about.
No, there are very few great radio stations, covering a small slice of the world's population. That there's a great station transmitting 3000 miles away doesn't help me.
The internet was a boon exactly because I was sick and tired of all the FM stations that I had available, with their narrow and small playlists, and it allowed me to discover whole new genres and authors (including by listening to online radio). In the mean time, FM just become even worse. The first half is essentially all I have available, do you care to choose a great one? https://radioonline.com.pt/
You shouldn't assume everyone has the same access to good things you did and must be lazy and narrow-minded.
I don't think you realise just how many songs are "out there".
And switching to a given song's frequency wouldn't be the same as being able to listen on-demand: you'd rarely happen to catch it such that you start listening at the beginning.
OnRad.io[1][2] lets you search for any song on their sources for internet radio and if it’s available, you can stream it from any of the matches. It’s the only thing I’ve seen which does this in real-time. I wish you could add arbitrary streams to search from. I think Winamp could do this back in the day, but not sure of other app based solutions for this.
Kind of the reverse of what you may mean by broadcasting every song, but if the songs are already being broadcast, tune in.
Why is it a request or a requirement to not just have streaming Spotify or [insert music streaming service] over a cellular connection?
Satellite radio has awful audio quality for music. I am far from an audiophile, but even I can hear that Sirius/XM sounds like those MP3s I used to download over dialup to save time.
I did it when I used to work in the office, and it was pretty nice. I have the first generation Apple Watch, so the phone still had to be nearby, but I could keep my phone in my pocket, and it freed up a little space on my desk.
My wife uses the current Apple Watch with AirPods at work, and only uses her phone at home. She leaves her phone in her purse, and seems happy to not have to carry anything else around.
I did it last summer for running. I have an Apple Watch series 4. It's pretty restrictive -- you must use Apple Music, and you can only play Apple Music playlists -- i.e., you can't just search for music and play that. It was nice running without a phone, but I have a Flip Belt this year and it doesn't bother me.
I have a watch with cell service and AirPods. I leave my phone at home when running and biking. Works fine for music and emergency comms, with negligible weight to bounce around. Also stops me leaving my phone behind in the gym.
It's entirely feasible but what's the point. By the time you have designed an efficient network for distributing all kinds of audio from 1 (idealized server) to N earpods you've basically just reinvented the internet anyway. There are too many people without any internet connections (or food, let's be honest) to fuck around with a system like that ethically or with any financial responsibility.
TIL that the Walkman was sold as the Freestyle here in Sweden, which is why that word was adopted for any kind of portable music player.
It's one of those fun corners where Swedish contains an English word for something, which doesn't match the word actually used by people speaking English. :) This might be what linguists call a "false friend", but I'm not sure. I also love the German "beamer" (=video projector) in this category.
It's in very used shape, the battery leaked and the face plate with the tuning frequency is loose. I remember buying it at Crazy Eddie's in NJ to replace the yellow sports walkman I managed to destroy.
I can't begin to describe how much I used to dread when the batteries would begin to get depleted which would slow down the motor turning the cassette and distort the sound being produced.
Boom boxes have made a comeback. Some phones are pretty loud. You can buy a lightweight sound amplifier to add to a phone. People use these hiking, running, biking, at picnics, etc.
I understand at a picnic... I don’t understand people by themselves wanting to project on to others their music choices after they’ve become adults. As a teenager I understand why we might have done that, but not grown adults.
I've come across lots of hikers and trail runners doing this, usually small groups of HS students. It's not really a big deal because they pass by in a matter of seconds, or you can let them pass you if they're going the same way. In some ways it's safer to use ambient audio on the trail rather than headphones.
I only saw four features which I thought added value to a walkthing
1) dual headphone output. Sharing is cool!
2) a microphone. This changed journalism from niche device with dictation cassette to street journalist. Democratisation of news followed a trend down from a five person crew to two or one as VHS came in.
3) l and r separated volume. Only saw it once but for cheap stereo it meant you could do music minus one and dial down vocals on one channel
One totally genius design feature of the Walkman was the fact that it had two headphone jacks. Together with music ripping and mix tapes, this was the beginning of music sharing, and eventually the downfall of the monolithic music industries. Truly a disruptive innovation.
True.. it was not the first. But it was I believe the first portable one that was capable of playing an entire cassette tape from beginning to end. It was the new generation rare earth magnets that enabled this.
I think they must be overstating the thing about headphones being unprecedented. Episode 1 of the sitcom “Dobie Gillis”, from 1959, introduces Bob Denver’s character by showing him listening to a transistor radio using an earpiece
I don't like that website. Do they really need fixed bars on the top and bottom asking me to subscribe? Not to mention article is littered with ads and a half screen nag as soon as you start scrolling.
And the walkman is arguably one of the classic cases of “build it, and they will come”, where a product was well ahead of what consumers were already calling for. In my mind, that’s the kind of thing actually deserving the visionary label.