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13-year-old kid trades his iPod for an original Sony Walkman
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The first question that may pop into your head is 'Why?' No, he wasn't dared to do it, it wasn't part of the cruel hazing rituals that teens go through today, it was simply an experiment by BBC News to see what a tech savvy kid of the millennium would think of the latest and greatest gadget of the 70s and 80s.
Yep, for those of you who weren't keeping track (shame on you) the Sony Walkman was launched 30 years ago this week. It was all the rage with its "ultra portability" and easy access to music. Of course, the portable music industry has advanced in technology since then, thank God, and today our MP3 players are science fiction compared to the Walkman. So when this 13-year-old boy decided to try it, what did he think?
Throughout my week using the Walkman, I came to realize that I have very little knowledge of technology from the past. I made a number of naive mistakes, but I also learned a lot about the grandfather of the MP3 Player.
Ouch. The "grandfather"? Never do you want anything you used to use be called a grandfather. However, the kid has a point. These things are pretty old and there are a few "features", shall we call them, that kind of make you wonder why they were so popular to begin with.
Scott Campbell, the young boy, states the obvious, that it was big - the size of a "small book". It also wasn't very aesthetically pleasing to the eyes of the iPod user. This, along with the fact that the Walkman is rather heavy, put the music player in the red right from the start.
Let's get on to the mechanics. Because the Walkman plays tapes, the amount of music you can carry around with you is very limited, unlike the iPod or other portable music players, which allow you to carry thousands of songs everywhere you go. Of course, even though tapes have a limited amount of space, it does help if you turn the tape over.
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.
That being said, it's still not very portable when you take into account how many tapes you'd have to carry around to get a good variety. (I guess that's why we came up with "mix tapes" idea. Ah, remember those?) Our user also didn't like the "warbly sounds" the player made or the fact that there was no shuffle feature.
Overall, we're all glad that technology has grown since 1979, when the Walkman hit the shelves. However, while most of us wouldn't trade our MP3 players for a Walkman, you have to give credit to Sony for introducing a new way of listening to music and not being afraid to push the boundaries of portable media. Because of this clunky gadget, we can now carry around The All-American Rejects, The Killers, Britney Spears, Pat Benetar, The Rolling Stones, or anyone else our ears find appealing, right in our pocket. Thanks Sony.
Read the full article: BBC News
Interesting article about the release of the Sony Walkman on July 2, 1979
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