Humming Off Key for Two Decades (2025)

July 29, 1999

Humming Off Key For Two Decades

In 1979, the Sony Walkman MadeMusic Portable and Heralded the Ageof Personal Electronics
By PHIL PATTON

Humming Off Key for Two Decades (1)n the original model of the Sony Walkman, introduced in the United States 20 years ago this month, there was an orange button. The TPS-L2, a blue-black plastic model released in this country under the name Soundabout, played cassette tapes, but it also had a second earphone jack and an extra set of earphones. When you pushed the orange button, two users of the Walkman could speak to each other through a microphone.


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It was a revealing feature: Sony was apparently worried about the solitary nature of the device. The orange button was like a panic button, an emergency "share" feature. The company was hesitant to release a product that could be considered selfish, Akio Morita, a Sony co-founder, wrote later.

The orange button was soon removed and the name Soundabout was replaced with Walkman, the name under which the device had been released in Japan six months earlier. Sony's invention quickly became an enormous success, largely because of its solitary nature. Competitors introduced rival products into the new category of "personal portable audio," but the trademark name Walkman became synonymous in everyday speech with personal portable tape player.

Sound Effects
The success of the original Walkman created the category of personal, portable technology and filled consumers' pockets with an array of new products in an expanding range of formats.
Humming Off Key for Two Decades (2)
Panasonic SL-SW870 CD Player
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Aiwa CR-LD100 Radio
Humming Off Key for Two Decades (4)
Sony PSYC Walkman
Humming Off Key for Two Decades (5)
Diamond Rio MP3 Player
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Casio Portable Television
Humming Off Key for Two Decades (7)
Sharp Minidisc Player-Recorder

Now, on the 20th anniversary, the Walkman is close to a staple; more than 185 million have been sold. A Walkman very much like the model that cost $200 20 years ago can be found for $20, blister-wrapped on the shelves of discount stores or even drugstore chains.

The basic shape of the first model has evolved into many models and styles of Walkmans (Sony's preferred plural): personal sound demanded personal style.

Stephen Bayley, a design historian, calls the Walkman one of the most significant products of its time. For many years, it symbolized the success of Japan's economy, as well as the skill of its engineers in miniaturization and of its marketers in sales and packaging.

It even evoked the Japanese tradition of design: the blue-black case resembled a traditional Japanese lacquered box.

More important, the Walkman changed people's relationship to technology; its solitary, enveloping quality became its defining feature. The Walkman and its rivals quickly became a landmark in the history of media and a symbol of an inwardly focused era. "Personal sound" was a forerunner of personal computers and personal digital assistants.

Michael Schiffer, author of "The Portable Radio in American Life" (University of Arizona Press, 1991), notes that the idea of private portable music was initiated in the mid-1950's by the transistor radio with its single earpiece. The difference the Walkman brought, Professor Schiffer said in an interview, was to free the listener from dependence on the fixed programs of radio. The tape cassette (first introduced in 1965) allowed people to choose their music. People made tapes of their favorite music, but they also purchased recorded tapes.

By 1983 the Walkman had helped push sales of cassette tapes past those for vinyl records.

Robert Nell, Sony's vice president in charge of audio products, said that the Walkman "provided listeners with a personal soundtrack to their lives."

Stephen Holt, of the design firm Frogdesign, which provided Sony with alternative designs in the early days of the Walkman, said that the Walkman "brought a kind of spectacle to daily life and made humdrum activities feel cinematic."

Three decades ago, the sociologist Edward Hall introduced the concept of the space bubble, a culturally conditioned distance that dictates how close people stand to others and how much space someone needs to feel comfortable.

The Walkman might be said to have introduced another kind of bubble: a technogical bubble of concentration and obliviousness to surroundings, a private space in public. Today, the streets are full of cellular telephone users enveloped in similar bubbles of communication and concentration. Palm organizers and other small digital devices have similar effects.

The psychological effects showed up first with the Walkman: note how the mobile Walkman user boldly makes eye contact with other pedestrians, as if somehow unconsciously reasoning that because onlookers cannot hear what he is listening to, they also cannot see what he is looking at.

Having arrived at the beginning of the 80's, the Walkman seems to have signaled the beginning of a time of introspection, even narcissism. Holt recalls hearing and reading the sentiment in the early 1980's that the Walkman fostered dangerous isolation and immersion. That immersion led to traffic laws forbidding drivers to wear the devices, lest they fail to hear a crucial horn or siren.


Humming Off Key for Two Decades (8)
A Space of One's Own

All figures are for the Walkman cassette players only.

The First Walkman
Released July 1979

Price: $199.95

Name:Walkman(Japan)
Soundabout(United States)
Freestyle(Australia)
Stowaway(Britain)

Number of Models Distributed Since 1979:

In Japan: 180
Worldwide: more than 600

Sales Since 1979
186 million as of March 1999

Landmarks In 1983, for the first time, the number of prerecorded cassettes sold in the United States (236 million) exceeded that of LP's.

In 1986 the trademarked name Walkman was included in the Oxford English Dictionary.


There are many different accounts of the creation of the Walkman. One widely disseminated tale had Akio Morita playing tennis and wishing that he could have his music with him on the court. That corporate myth is in keeping with the Japanese business tradition of crediting a company's leader with all important innovations. Another apocryphal tale had Morita visiting a factory and talking to a worker who asked for tunes on the assembly line. (Here the chief executive figures as benevolent boss.)

But the most convincing account, pieced together from Sony's own documents and Morita's autobiography, "Made in Japan," ascribes the Walkman idea to Masaru Ibuka, with whom Morita had founded the company. Ibuka was the more technical of the pair and often visited the development laboratories. He expressed frustration at not being able to carry his favorite music with him on airplanes.

To please him, in November 1978 a Sony engineer named Shizuo Takashino began with the Pressman, a Sony tape recorder popular among reporters. He removed the recording apparatus and speaker and added a stereo amplifier. The only real technical breakthrough was the development of light headphones, with their little sponge earpieces.

These were found in a laboratory next door.

The revealing part of Morita's tale regards the reaction when he took the prototype Walkman home. "I noticed my experiment was annoying my wife, who felt shut out," he reported in his book, so he ordered the addition of a second headset jack and the orange button. Morita "thought it would be considered rude for one person to be listening to his music in isolation."

Sony's sales staff had another worry -- that no one would buy a tape player that could only play, not record. Morita insisted that it be a player only. Car stereo players didn't record and no one minded, he pointed out. Without any market testing, the product was ordered into production within four months.

The virtuosity of the first Walkman was that it daringly exposed precise technology to the perils of portability.

In the years since, personal music technology has improved a great deal. The first Walkman could run for 8 hours on a single charge of its batteries; today's models can run for 60. But for listening to sound on the go, tape was succeeded by the portable CD. From the Walkman sprang the Discman and the Watchman and their competitors. Sony's Minidisc, a format that has still not caught on, continues the tradition, as do portable MP3 devices like the Diamond Rio and Creative's Nomad: different media, same message.

Sony continues to tinker with the device it made famous. There is a Walkman room in a Sony building in the Shinagawa section of Tokyo that housed the advanced engineering team for the company. It is the only place in the world where an example of each of the 200-some Walkman models is preserved. The best known are displayed in a glass box of 30 cubicles; shelves contain dozens more. There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of variants in color and material. No one in the company seems to know quite how many.

Richard Gioscia, director of Sony's design center in Park Ridge, N.J., said the phrase "lifestyle enhancement" was now used to match the design of individual Walkman models to activities like running or camping -- the Walkman had quickly become associated with athletic activity. People ran or did aerobics with their machines in hand. But when the designers really looked at runners using the devices, Gioscia said, they found that instead of clipping them to their waistbands or belts, they tended to carry them. So his designers developed "grip" models.

The personal tape player gave a restless generation handpicked music to go.

Changes in fashion have brought white, then black, then silver Walkmans. The Sports line took its yellow from the bright color of scuba divers' air tanks. A line called Outback came in sand-colored plastic and had a ribbed body, signaling ruggedness like a Jeep Sahara vehicle.

In the United States, Sony has offered models called Freq and Psyc. Aimed at teen-agers, the Psyc line clips to a belt or backpack. Some Psyc models are molded of the same translucent blues and greens as the iMac computer.

"I am as different as they are," the slogan for the Psyc line, would serve as a worthy motto for the whole history of the Walkman. A product that began as a basic box, a universal sound appliance, has taken on as many different shapes and styles as the music played on it.

Increasingly models have been developed for varying markets around the world. In Europe, there is Yppy, a ribbed metallic line, as rigid as the techno music popular there. In Japan there are glow-in-the-dark Walkmans and models inspired by the Hello Kitty line of characters.

Last year, Sony released a kidney-shape plastic model called Beans. It was the first Walkman to be designed by a woman, Rie Isono. Its shape suggested a device as vital to daily life as an internal organ.

Humming Off Key for Two Decades (2025)

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