Horse 293 - 30 Years of Walkmans

Just a little over 30 years ago in 1975, the Sony Walkman started to appear on the Tokyo Subway. Hailed as the new gadget of the 20th century it was bound to change the way people commuted. It meant that for the first time that someone could be surrounded in their own little music bubble and not have to listen to the hub-drub of sweaty often noisy metro carriages.

The first major advance it had was that for the first time people could listen to cassettes (do you remember those?) as well as the radio. People could literally take their own music whereever they went. Of course ettiquette soon suggested that if you had your Walkman up so loud that others could hear it, then in polite Japanese society you were instantly looked down upon and given a very very hard stare.

Ray Bradbury predicted this all the way back in 1951 in Fahrenheit 451, when he suggested that "the bees in people's ears, swept away the silence no leaving any time to think or question". I suppose that that is correct and especially when you look at the types who have their "music" (read chish-chish-chish for that's all you ever seem to hear outside), up so loud that even in not-so-polite society they're still derided as idiots.

Technology moved on from cassettes through CD's and the ill-fated MD experiment. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shinji Ikari wears a Sony Walkman that plays S-DAT tapes and what's really intruging about that is here we have a technology that was superceeded before it began and it appears even more archaic in 2015. The most recent technological advance is MP3 and the inevitable rise of iPod and Shuffle devices: instantly desirable they were the "must have" items of Christmas 2004.

I find it odd though that the utility of those original chunky cassette Walkmans is still difficult to find. It's almost impossible to find a CD Walkman with an AM/FM radio and when DAB strikes I fear that it too will be difficult to find. I expect that the most common application in 4 years time when DAB is finally the only last free radio medium (once both AM & FM are terminated - 01-01-08) that MP3/DAB will finally be commonplace.

I still however would have liked to have seen what would have happened if the electrics had been around say in 1955 whether we would have had anti-skip LP Walkmans... 12" of anti-skip technology? That would have been hillarious to watch people carry those about.