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Photos: Rewinding 30 years of the Walkman

Jul 6, 2009

Thirty years ago, people were fascinated at a little machine called the Walkman. We take a look at some of the original models.

It's hard to imagine our lives without portable music--nowadays most of us can fit our entire music collection into an MP3 player the size of a deck of cards. But, 30 years ago, as people hefted boomboxes off their shoulders, they oooh'ed and ahhhh'ed in fascination at a little machine called the Walkman.

Originally, portable cassette players were marketed for people who needed to record audio clips for their work, like journalists and businesspeople, but Sony's Walkman brought the idea of playing cassettes to the masses. Not only did many a Walkman have cassette players, AM/FM dials, and dual headphone jacks, they also had cool features like auto-reverse, play, and record.

Pictured here is the first Sony Walkman--the TPS-L2, introduced in 1979 and launched in the US in 1980. This Walkman cost US$200 in the US and was called "one of the hottest new status symbols around" by The Wall Street Journal in 1980. Like consumers of today's iPods, people had to wait at least a month to get the TPS-L2 because of a backlog in orders.

Sony sold 30,000 Walkmans in its first two months and 50 million in the following decade. Last week, as the Sony Walkman turns 30, our sister site CNET.com decided to take a look at some of the original Walkmans.

Picture credit: AFP PHOTO/Yoshikazu TSUNO
Caption credie: Dara Kerr/CNET