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

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#141

Post by astrodust » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:44 PM 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".)

Somehow Sony made a cassette player that was barely bigger than a typical cassette case. You rarely see engineering like that.

Today electronics can be made smaller, thinner and so on, but this was a complex, intrinsically mechanical device. That's the amazing part. That player is like a well-made watch.

It was probably an off-shoot of their camcorder miniaturization efforts. Those got incredibly tiny considering they had to act like a VCR, helical head and all.

The sad thing is that as soon as Sony perfected the cassette player the CD was the popular medium and they had to do it all over again. When they perfected that MP3 showed up.

It's like how they made a perfect CRT and then flat panels hit hard.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#142

Post by ipunchghosts » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

This will probably get buried but does anyone remember having to flip the tape over and the experience associated with the album in doing that? For example, on Metallica's Black Album, it ends on the first side Don't tread on me and then starts on the second side wtih Through the Never. If you dont know about the tape flip, you dont appreciate the beggining of "through the never" IMHO.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#143

Post by AstralStorm » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

totaldude87 wrote: post #135

The problem with pioneers is that , they rarely move to next level, may be due to the thinking that "whatever" they have today just rocks and will "probably" rock tomorrow. Few Examples : Nokia missing the Android boat - thinking Symbian was great Windows missing the Mobile operating system boat - thinking Windows Phone OS was great Sony missing the iPod boat - thinking , hey we got Walkman , what else you need. And…

Apple with the end of the Mac and iPhone is next? ;)

(What's ahead is not quite predictable. It might be VR, BCI or something entirely different from either.)

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#144

Post by Isamu » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

>It’s weird to think that, in the years before the Walkman, there was no way to listen to music privately while out in public. There were ways to bring music with you — on transistor radios, on boom boxes, on car stereos — but they forced you to subject everyone around you to that music, as well.

No, the mono earpiece was a common thing with many transistor radios from the 60's. They didn't have stereo, no, so they didn't accomodate 2-ear pods or headphones.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#145

Post by acomjean » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

haywirez wrote: post #44

niftich wrote: post #11

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…

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the UX of cassettes and vinyl encouraged an immeasurably deeper immersion and exploration of music. My walkman would keep playing as the battery died, playing the music slower and slower still for about 20-25 minutes. This was fun and made it easier to figure out how electronic drum patterns and sounds were put together. To say that had an impact on my own productions later would be…

I had the opposite experience once. In the 90s Louis Farrakhan spoke at umass. It was a strange time.

I worked at the college paper and a reporter let me listen to her tape. when listening back he kept getting higher and higher pitched. It finally occurred to me that when recording him batteries where getting lower and lower and the tape was recording slower. When played back at normal speeds.. it never got to “Alvin and the chipmunks” high pitch but.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#146

Post by Grimm665 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

ipunchghosts wrote: post #142

This will probably get buried but does anyone remember having to flip the tape over and the experience associated with the album in doing that? For example, on Metallica's Black Album, it ends on the first side Don't tread on me and then starts on the second side wtih Through the Never. If you dont know about the tape flip, you dont appreciate the beggining of "through the never" IMHO.

The vinyl flip required for Dark Side of the Moon really highlights the fact that the album is kind of split in half. Tracks on the first half smoothly transition to each other, but then have a hard stop before Money on side B. It's a really interesting case of music being composed for the medium.

I found a similar example in digital media only once so far, Pretty Lights Glowing in the Darkest Night. The first half of the EP sounds very distinct from the second, almost as if there is an invisible vinyl flip in the middle.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#147

Post by wholoveshn6 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

Wallmans remind me that I don't talk to enough six year old girls. Where talk is fuck indiscriminately

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#148

Post by wholoveshn6 » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

wholoveshn6 wrote: post #147

Wallmans remind me that I don't talk to enough six year old girls. Where talk is fuck indiscriminately

Why walk when you can fuck, as it is in the Morrowind world.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#149

Post by badamp » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

jacobush wrote: post #97

badamp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember how iPod beat Walkman No. No I don’t. Who the fuck was still using a Walkman in 2001?

The mp3 players of 2001 were so fucked up that keeping your Walkman in use wasn’t uncommon. Not among techies maybe but regular people, many of whom didn’t even have a computer yet. How would they even fill their mp3 players? (And even the techies could sigh - rip CDs? Download mp3 from ftp sites?) On many occasions it was still easier, even in 2001, to dub a CD to a cassette than juggle the computer gear.

The Walkman was sold until recently (if it isn’t still) and of course living in a big city you see a handful of people using a Walkman. It never died completely. There is of course the hipster resurgence of cassettes of the 2010s. Of all this I’m aware. But techie or hipster or not I was around in 2001 and the Walkman was well past mass adoption by that point in the western world. Shitty MP3 players that people loaded up with Napster and Discmans/Aiwas knockoff were what the poors and regulars did. MD and nicer hard drive players were the enthusiast options. The iPod did not have the Walkman to contend with in a meaningful sense.

Also in the US at least, the majority of households had a PC by 2001. I came from a shit poor backwater by this sites standards. We had computers.

And by 2001, FTP sites? That was post peak of Napster (after Feb 2001). Kazaa, Emule, etc were all regulars options. You’re a few years off, which was substantial in the 95-2001 timeframe.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#150

Post by EliRivers » Tue, Jul 02, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #79

niftich wrote: post #11

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…

When I was a student I worked up a mix tape for a girl I was into. I spun the tape to the start of the second track then gave it to her. Next time I saw her I (casually) asked her something she could only answer if she'd heard the first track. That meant I knew she'd played it through, then rewound it and played it again.

I remember that when someone would hand me a tape, I would generally rewind it to the start before pressing play; especially if I could see that they had not rewound it before giving it to me. Maybe she did that rather than play it twice.