ウォークマン

Are you the proud owner of an iPod or any other MP3 Player?

Do you consider yourself special and one of a kind?

Well, you have no idea what it was like to own a device that allowed you to listen to music anywhere you wanted.

This device revolutionized the way people experienced music and it created a movement that still exists today. Do you know what piece of equipment we are referring to?

The Walkman.

The Walkman isn’t difficult to understand – put simply, it is a portable cassette player, which was first introduced 41 years ago. If you still think it was nothing special, you should know that 200 million units were sold worldwide. Now it’s easy to understand that it rocked the recording industry and changed people’s relationship with music, especially as far as teens and young adults were concerned.

In terms of engineering, the Walkman doesn’t represent anything too complicated to create. Philips had already developed the cassette, which, however, could only be played at home.

One day, the Chairman of the famous company Sony, called Ibuka Masaru, asked for a player that would allow him to listen to music in airplanes on business trips. And so, Sony engineers got to work and soon the Walkman was born, not with the intention of producing it for the masses, but to please the chairman of the company.

How did it end up being called “Walkman”? Apparently, Mr. Walkman was the nickname of the leader of the development team, and so this device took his name. In Japanese, people pronounce it (ウォークマン), this is, "uwokman". In American English the pronunciation is "walkmun", and in British English it is "wolk-man".

Isn’t it funny that such a simple object would change the world? The thing you take for granted, being able to listen to music when you’re commuting to work, going to school, working out in the park, going for a walk, riding your bike… personal portable music didn't exist for most of human history, so Sony did end up causing a revolution. The Walkman paved the path forward – from cassettes to CDs, MP3 and MP4, downloads, and streaming services on smartphones.

To sum up, the golden days of the Walkman may be over, but the habit it created —

listening to music wherever and whenever you want — is still here and won’t go away any time soon ;)

Sources: http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1907884,00.html

https://www.theverge.com/2014/7/1/5861062/sony-walkman-at-35

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman