Last week – coincident with the original Walkman’s 40th birthday – I saw all these articles reporting on this supposedly “world’s first” Bluetooth enabled portable Walkman-style cassette player/recorder, named IT’S OK (yes, the brand is in all caps). Reactions to this Kickstarter ranged from snarky to excited, but all the coverage struck me as a […]
The Sony Walkman celebrated its 40th birthday on Monday, July 1. While portable audiocassette recorder/players that you could connect to headphones had been around pretty much since the invention of the medium, the Walkman was the first one designed specifically for stereo playback on the go, for personal listening, without even a tiny speaker. Although […]
![An attempt to resolve Walkman/Boombox tension via a 'boombox/walkman' [stereo2go.com]](https://www.radiosurvivor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/boomwalk-250x125.jpg "Notes on the Boombox/Walkman war of the early 1980s")
I’ve been rummaging through old articles about the emergence of the Walkman in the 1980s, and one thing stands out: some people thought it was a social cure for the Boombox. Here’s an excerpt from an old column by George Will, responding to the charge that the Walkman isolated people from each other. ‘Some sociologists […]
