The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago • Hacker News Board

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#11

Post by niftich » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:33 AM UTC

The UX of cassettes was very useful for sharing and swapping music or speech, and for resuming where one left off. Because of the linear tape, the cassette's "playback cursor" was stateful and independent from whether the medium was read-only or not. Playback resumed at (nearly) the same spot as it was last stopped, even if moved to a different player. Successor formats didn't have this property.

Interestingly, Sony emulated the auto-resume feature in some Discman CD players, and later it became common in car CD players, but there was no way to maintain playback position after swapping players. Later, MP3 players maintained their own playback state, but getting tracks on or off the device's built-in or removable storage was with file-based interfaces that connected to computers.

This stateful cursor functionality is only returning these days with URLs to media-hosting sites that accept timecode parameters.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#12

Post by throwaway2048 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:34 AM UTC

xeromal wrote: post #5

Any idea what the hotline feature was like?

There was a lot of concern inside Sony that the Walkman would be perceived as anti-social, that's why it came with two headphone jacks, and the hotline feature which let others talk to you, via microphone, over the music.

Both were essentially gimmicks and never really worked well, and were soon dropped.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#13

Post by JKCalhoun » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:39 AM UTC

Daub wrote: post #2

The complete genius of the Walkman was that it featured two headphone jacks. Such a simple design decision, with such large ramifications. In total, the Walkman is a classic example of a disruptive industry: creating new industries and killing (or at least mortally wounding) old ones. I remember how terminally moribund the industry-controlled pop charts had become before mix tapes became a thing.

I guess I never took advantage of that.

For me it was:

1) Headphones — I was used to listening to music from speakers. Even familiar music was new sounding with headphones. I had listened through headphones before, but infrequently. The Walkman only had headphones — checkmate.

2) Walking around (rocking around) with my music. Sure, "transistor radios" had been around for decades, but this was a compact, stereo, cassette player.

…I'm reminded of Frank Black's "I Heard Ramona Sing" — a tribute to both the Ramones and the Walkman.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#14

Post by Timothycquinn » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:42 AM UTC

I recall my brother coming back from a trip to Japan with a top end Walkman in the early 90's. It was seemed to be all metal and so small. Was a mechanical work of art.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#15

Post by 13of40 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:43 AM UTC

galonk wrote: post #4

My first walkman was a WM-22, not that much smaller than the first model. My last was a WM-150, which was just a few mm larger than the actual tape in each direction. It felt amazingly elegant. (Took me a while to find out the model numbers by looking at image searches... Sony always had the worst product "names".)

I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but several years ago I read that the original was a little bigger than pocket sized, so Sony had shirts with slightly bigger pockets made to demo it.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#16

Post by StringyBob » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:44 AM UTC

Although The Walkman was released 40 years ago, Sony had actually made something that will look familiar another 10 years earlier and was used on Apollo moon missions: https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/5254hjpg https://www.sony.net/Fun/design/history/product/1960/tc-50.h...

Incidentally, I only discovered this recently after hearing the Apollo 11 astronauts use one to play a prank on mission control while on the way back to earth. You can hear this at the amazing https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/ (definitely works best on desktop not mobile)

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#17

Post by tw04 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:48 AM UTC

samplatt wrote: post #8

dugditches wrote: post #6

Remember the cool kid having a Dual Deck stereo to make mixtapes. Having a rats nest of tape when one failed. Then that evolving into whoever had good internet and a CD Burner. Eventually almost 'renting' music by returning a CD-RW with a new request list. Just how much Discmans would skip with Burnt CD's versus Legitimate ones. To spending $500 on a 128mb MP3 player. Compressing Mp3's into tiny WMA's.

For an entity that's waged a multi-decade billion-dollar bloody and bitter war against music piracy, Sony certainly have been instrumental in its proliferation.

That's because the device group is a different entity than the media group. Unfortunately the media group made enough money to start dictating things to the device group which didn't single handedly ruin it, but definitely opened the door to the Korean rivals that weren't bending over backwards to stop consumers from using their devices.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#18

Post by JKCalhoun » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:54 AM UTC

W-Stool wrote: post #9

Don't forget the MiniDisc format that Sony also released years later under the "Walkman" brand - for a while there it was an audio storage format and playback hardware that briefly seemed ahead of its time. Sony, if nothing else, were technical innovators during their best days. You knew the gear wasn't imagined and designed by a bunch of bean counters.

> You knew the gear wasn't imagined and designed by a bunch of bean counters.

Hmmm.... Only later when they were marketing TV's?

Hated Sony for selling essentially the same TV with the same guts but leaving out one chip (for example) so that "Picture in Picture" required you spend an extra $500 on the high end model.

I always suspected it went something like this:

• Engineers describe the feature set they can deliver for a new TV.

• Bean counters determine it can be manufactured for $500.

• Marketing decide there will be three models: the F, the FX, and the FX+. Determine pricing will be: $800, $1200, $1800.

• Marketing aligns the FX+ model with the engineers feature set — cross off features to arrive at the FX — cross off even more to arrive at the F.

• Profit.

I shouldn't beat up on Sony though — all consumer electronics have been doing something like this since ... when ... the 1950's or so?

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#19

Post by BLKNSLVR » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:59 AM UTC

dugditches wrote: post #6

Remember the cool kid having a Dual Deck stereo to make mixtapes. Having a rats nest of tape when one failed. Then that evolving into whoever had good internet and a CD Burner. Eventually almost 'renting' music by returning a CD-RW with a new request list. Just how much Discmans would skip with Burnt CD's versus Legitimate ones. To spending $500 on a 128mb MP3 player. Compressing Mp3's into tiny WMA's.

I was most definitely not cool, but I did have a dual-cassette stereo with a "high-speed dubbing" function that was used regularly.

Thinking back on it, its all that music sharing that really opened my eyes (ears!) to music that was outside the mainstream and would have been otherwise essentially locked away from the opportunity to listen to it long enough to really get it. Complex music.

Who I am today thanks the creators of that subversive technology of yesterday.

In regards to the rats nest of failed tape. A friend of mine and I took a few tapes apart in order to reverse the spools to listen to them backwards. I think we were only able to get one back together well enough to actually work... I remember putting some together which played forwards again because double reversal = forwards...

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#20

Post by ignoramous » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:03 AM UTC

The Walkman is a classic case of how an entrenched competitor with deep pockets couldn't really stand in the way of an innovative product. I point this out because, whenever you come across an idea for a startup, you'd inadvertently find one or more businesses already built around the idea, sometimes with ginormous funding or income. Remember how iPod beat Walkman, Firefox gazumped IE, Zoom sped past WebX, stripe pocketed payments: Find the key pain points and try to solve them. Don't turn a blind eye [0] no matter how difficult they might be to solve, you wouldn't know it until you try.

To quote mittermayr from a recent thread [1]:

> Don't throw away an idea because someone else has already made it. People completely underestimate the amount of money you can make as a runner-up, or even as a 5th or 10th-place service in some markets. Most of the products I'm involved with have made me quite substantial amounts over the years compared to the minimal time required to upkeep them. There's at least ten companies I can name at an instant that do almost exactly the same, yet I still make money doing the very same thing.

> Appreciate the invaluable advantage a market-proven idea brings and focus on whatever its target audience lacks or loves most about the most-popular offering. It doesn't mean you have to copy something (where's the fun in that), but consider this if you start working on something and then come across someone who's done the exact same thing with good success. Don't give up, use it.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19164873