Posted on: Friday, July 16, 2004

Walkman turns 25

By Daniel Rubin
Knight Ridder News Service

Twenty-five years ago this month, America tuned out.

A midnight-blue-and-silver brick with astonishing sound debuted in July 1979. Called the Soundabout, Sony's TPS-L2 cassette player was an investment at $199.95.

It didn't record or come with a speaker. But it was sociable: Two could listen through a pair of headphone jacks, and the orange Hotline button let you talk over the music.

Sony quickly scrapped the name and went with what it called the pocket-size player in the Japanese market.

Walkman.

Since then, 340 million of the suckers — including CD and digital players — have been sold. Walkman has worked its way into the Oxford English Dictionary. And street etiquette has never been the same.

Masaru Ibuka wasn't thinking of a revolution when he asked his Sony underlings for something to take with him on a long flight to the States. The Sony co-founder was thinking it would be nice to hear classical music.

Engineers in the tape-recorder division tinkered with the Pressman, a portable monaural device popular with journalists, removing its speaker and ability to record. According to Sony's corporate history, Ibuka called from America: The batteries had run out and the tapes they'd given him were blank.

Late Chairman Akio Morita is credited with championing the new player, sensing how young people would want their music with them all the time.

At his insistence, the original Walkman wasn't an isolating machine. The Hotline button let someone interrupt your music if necessary. A demonstration film showed a couple listening to a Walkman while riding a tandem bike. Executives had worried that their product would diminish the pleasure people got from listening to music together.

By 1981, the Hotline was history.

Michael Schiffer, author of "The Portable Radio in American Life" and an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, said when he looks at something, he starts thinking about what happened before.

"The Walkman was critical in altering the rules of being with other people," Schiffer said. "People thought it was rude to listen to music in public. Now our standards have eroded to the route we've gone down with cell phones, which is to sanction rudeness. We are losing sociability."