Even taking into account that many of the Pressman devices were adapted into products, this is an exceptionally short span for that era. The Pressman left and the first-generation Walkman were highly similar in appearance.
A demonstration for reporters in Meiji Park showed how the Walkman could be used on the move. The journalists were given their own devices with cassettes of music and narration to walk around with.
This explosive popularity continued into the following year. Total sales for the first seven months amounted to , Compared with the social phenomenon the Walkman would become, however, this was just a prologue. In January , the Nikkei drew attention to students listening to portable stereos before university entrance examinations.
The WM-2, launched in Unlike the first generation, the WM-2 was not directly based on an existing product, so it could be reimagined to meet an ideal form. The engineers aimed to reduce it to the size of a cassette case, and refined the design by moving the controls from the side to the front.
This model caught on overseas in particular, and is the most memorable version of the Walkman for many around the world who lived through the era.
Having learned from the continued shortages of the first-generation device, Sony ensured greater production for the WM In November , the Nikkei reported that its sales had hit 1 million units in nine months. By comparison, the first Walkman sold 1. Attention, the million or so owners of an Apple iPod MP3 player: take out those white earbuds and listen for a second. The portable cassette players, first introduced 30 years ago this week, sold a cumulative million units, rocked the recording industry and fundamentally changed how people experienced music.
Sound familiar? The Walkman wasn't a giant leap forward in engineering: magnetic cassette technology had been around since , when the Netherlands-based electronics firm Philips first created it for use by secretaries and journalists. Sony, who by that point had become experts in bringing well-designed, miniaturized electronics to market they debuted their first transistor radio in , made a series of moderately successful portable cassette recorders. But the introduction of pre-recorded music tapes in the late s opened a whole new market.
People still chose to listen to vinyl records over cassettes at home, but the compact size of tapes made them more conducive to car stereos and mobility than vinyl or 8-tracks. On July 1, , Sony Corp. It even had a second earphone jack so that two people could listen in at once.
Masaru Ibuka, Sony's co-founder, traveled often for business and would find himself lugging Sony's bulky TC-D5 cassette recorder around to listen to music. If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. We take portable music for granted these days. Any commuter in any big city in the world is more likely than not to have a pair of earbuds or headphones on as they walk, bike, or ride to their destination. The thing is, personal portable music didn't exist for most of human history, at least not in any mainstream fashion.
Not until the Sony Walkman came along. As the story goes , Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka got the wheels turning months before when he asked for a way to listen to opera that was more portable than Sony's existing TC-D5 cassette players. The charge fell to Sony designer Norio Ohga, who built a prototype out of Sony's Pressman cassette recorder in time for Ibuka's next flight. After a disappointing first month of sales, the Walkman went on to become one of Sony's most successful brands of all time, transitioning formats over the years into CD, Mini-Disc, MP3 and finally, streaming music.
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