Sony introduced the Walkman, the first portable audio cassette player on July 1, 1979. They called them "Walkman boogie-paks".
The first Walkmans went on sale for $150.
The corporation's chairman, co-founder, and chief executive officer, Akio Morita, otherwise known as Mr. Sony, had come up with the idea in response to the loud rock music his son and daughter played at home. The opera-loving chief asked his company's engineers to come up with a portable tape player that would be compact, lightweight, and capable of producing private but full stereo sound for one or two listeners through headphones which would give him access to all arias on plane flights.
The device that Sony's engineers came up with was a modification of a type of cassette recorder that journalists used. The story goes that Sony stuck a pair of headphones on to a cassette player for a test run on a golf course. Once it had realised how to make the headphones small and light enough (they used rare earth magnets) the Walkman was born.
Although Sony came up with the first popular personal stereo cassette player, the German-Brazilian Andreas Pavel had patented a similar device called the Stereobelt in 1977. Sony agreed to pay Pavel royalties, but refused to recognize him as the inventor of the personal stereo until a legal settlement in 2003.
When Sony first announced the Walkman they held an unusual press conference where different journalists were invited to Yoyogi, which is Tokyo's major park. They were each given a Walkman to prove that the portable player is fun and easy to use.
The original metal-cased blue-and-silver Walkman TPS-L2 was as big as a paperback book, and weighed 390 grams (14 ounces). It wasn't cheap, especially for those days, costing around ¥39,433.58 (or $150.00), or ¥57,109.02 (or $498.66) adjusted for inflation.
Though Sony predicted the Walkman would sell about 5,000 units a month, people snatched it up and it sold more than 50,000 in the first two months.
Other names were initially tried for international markets like "soundabout" and "stowaway." Sony soon settled on Walkman. The original logo had little feet on the A's in "WALKMAN."
The Sony Walkman changed the way people listen to music and resulted in a boom in cassette sales. Despite a rash of imitations, the Walkman became the generic term.
In 1984, Sony launched the Discman series which extended their Walkman brand to portable CD products.
Sony sold its waterproof Walkman in a bottle of water to prove it was really waterproof.
Over the next 30 years they sold over 385 million Walkmans in cassette, CD, mini-disc and digital file versions, and were the market leaders until the arrival of Apple's iPod.
Sony still continues to make cassette-based Walkman devices in China for the US and other overseas markets; however, they were discontinued in Japan on October 23, 2010.
Sources The Daily Mail, The Independent, Associated Press, The New Yorker
The first Walkmans went on sale for $150.
The corporation's chairman, co-founder, and chief executive officer, Akio Morita, otherwise known as Mr. Sony, had come up with the idea in response to the loud rock music his son and daughter played at home. The opera-loving chief asked his company's engineers to come up with a portable tape player that would be compact, lightweight, and capable of producing private but full stereo sound for one or two listeners through headphones which would give him access to all arias on plane flights.
Although Sony came up with the first popular personal stereo cassette player, the German-Brazilian Andreas Pavel had patented a similar device called the Stereobelt in 1977. Sony agreed to pay Pavel royalties, but refused to recognize him as the inventor of the personal stereo until a legal settlement in 2003.
When Sony first announced the Walkman they held an unusual press conference where different journalists were invited to Yoyogi, which is Tokyo's major park. They were each given a Walkman to prove that the portable player is fun and easy to use.
The original metal-cased blue-and-silver Walkman TPS-L2 was as big as a paperback book, and weighed 390 grams (14 ounces). It wasn't cheap, especially for those days, costing around ¥39,433.58 (or $150.00), or ¥57,109.02 (or $498.66) adjusted for inflation.
 |
| Original Sony Walkman TPS-L2 from 1979. By Binarysequence |
Though Sony predicted the Walkman would sell about 5,000 units a month, people snatched it up and it sold more than 50,000 in the first two months.
Other names were initially tried for international markets like "soundabout" and "stowaway." Sony soon settled on Walkman. The original logo had little feet on the A's in "WALKMAN."
The Sony Walkman changed the way people listen to music and resulted in a boom in cassette sales. Despite a rash of imitations, the Walkman became the generic term.
In 1984, Sony launched the Discman series which extended their Walkman brand to portable CD products.
Sony sold its waterproof Walkman in a bottle of water to prove it was really waterproof.
Over the next 30 years they sold over 385 million Walkmans in cassette, CD, mini-disc and digital file versions, and were the market leaders until the arrival of Apple's iPod.
The word "Walkman" became so popular in the German language as a generic term for a personal stereo that in 2002 the Austrian Supreme Court ruled that any brand, not just Sony, could use that word to describe such a device.
Sources The Daily Mail, The Independent, Associated Press, The New Yorker
No comments:
Post a Comment