61–70 of 180 posts
Any idea what the hotline feature was like?
> a "hotline" button which activated a small built-in microphone, partially overriding the sound from the cassette, and allowing one user to talk to the other over the music.
and as the other poster remarks
> When the follow-up model, "Walkman II" came out, the "hotline" button was phased out.
Was there ever an actual use case for this, or is it pure gimmick?
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 poc…
> Remember how iPod beat Walkman No. No I don’t. Who the fuck was still using a Walkman in 2001?
Freecom Beatman Mini CD MP3 Player ( https://www.semox.de/23-06-2008/verspateter-fruhjahrsputz-is..., scroll )
MP3 players in 2001 were either expensive or had tiny capacity, eg a single album, which was never enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love how you conceptualise things based upon what seems to be your familiarity with DB cursors, stateful interfaces and other CS concepts. You're absolutely right, of course - it's just an interesting choice of conceptual frameworks to position your analogy within. I'm sure a non-programmer could also identify this property of cassettes as a medium, but they wouldn't be anywhere near as precise, nor use anything li…
it's even more interesting to think that people designed these devices without this frame of reference
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Remember how iPod beat Walkman No. No I don’t. Who the fuck was still using a Walkman in 2001?
While the portable CD players from Sony were branded "Discman", they later used the "Walkman" brand for a range of featurephones (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_W580i ) explicitly designed as music players. So you could actually say that the _iPhone_ ultimately beat the Walkman...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's even more interesting to think that people designed these devices without this frame of reference
They didn't :-). The cursor -- a moving indicator, as part of a slide rule or any other similar instrument -- has been called that way since the early 17th century.
Walking with music has completely changed my life. Can't imagine the amount of ideas I've had and steps I've taken listening to music. With music I can cross the entire city on foot and more. footnote: do you remember when your batteries were running low and the cassette would start slowing down the music? ;)
I'll play Devil's Advocate here and say that the Walkman marked the beginning of the end for people having spatial awareness and social skills in public places.
You've only got to look at all the people meandering through our city streets today; ears plugged with headphones, faces glued to screens –often walking along with other people but yet completely detached from them, barely conscious of the world around them– to see what the Walkman's legacy is.
Personally I prefer to listen to my music on headphones when I'm alone and at a fixed location, rather than bimbling around, getting in other people's way and with my safety compromised by having my senses plugged up. I've actually seen cyclists riding in traffic with cycling helmets on [y'know, for the safety!] but also wearing headphones. Makes me cringe every time I pass one, knowing they've purposely cutting out the sounds of the traffic around them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It did ruin the minidisc, when Sony decided you couldn't get digital data from the disc.
IIRC one of the reasons was that the MiniDisc used lossy compression (ATRAC) to store audio onto the disc. So you couldn't actually store music digitally onto it, at least not the amount advertised. This was before MP3 was widespread, I remember people were upset that when they bought MiniDiscs they only got a lossy copy. Later revisions added higher capacity and digital storage but it was too little too late. [1] ht…
I feel it's time for boomboxes to come back. Not purple medicine-pill bluetooth players, but big ol' boxes you can put on your shoulder and Fight the Power with 8" speakers. There was a whole movement around playing music out , now we just inject it into our ear canals. Nostalgia... or genius?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It did ruin the minidisc, when Sony decided you couldn't get digital data from the disc.
there's an alternate universe where MiniDisc replaced floppies in the early 90s and became the main storage format.