Word: walkman
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...Walkman wasn't a giant leap forward in engineering: magnetic cassette technology had been around since 1963, 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 1955), made a series of moderately successful portable cassette recorders. But the introduction of pre-recorded music tapes in the late 1960s opened a whole new market. People still chose to listen to vinyl records over cassettes at home, but the compact size...
...device needed now was a name. Originally the Walkman was introduced in the U.S. as the "Sound-About" and in the UK as the "Stowaway," but coming up with new, uncopyrighted names in every country it was marketed in proved costly; Sony eventually decided on "Walkman" as a play on the Sony Pressman, a mono cassette recorder the first Walkman prototype was based on. First released in Japan, it was a massive hit: while Sony predicted it would only sell about 5,000 units a month, the Walkman sold upwards of 50,000 in the first two months. Sony wasn...
...1980s could well have been the Walkman decade. The popularity of Sony's device - and those by brands like Aiwa, Panasonic and Toshiba who followed in Sony's lead - helped the cassette tape outsell vinyl records for the first time in 1983. By 1986 the word "Walkman" had entered the Oxford English Dictionary. Its launch coincided with the birth of the aerobics craze, and millions used the Walkman to make their workouts more entertaining. Between 1987 and 1997 - the height of the Walkman's popularity - the number of people who said they walked for exercise increased by 30%. (See TIME...
...Sony continued to roll out variations on its theme, adding such innovations as AM/FM receivers, bass boost and auto-reverse on later models. Sony even made a solar-powered Walkman, water-resistant Sport Walkmans and even devices with two cassette drives. But cassettes, like any technology, weren't going to last forever. With the introduction of compact discs in 1982 the format began to go the way of the 8-track itself...
...Sony, however, was fairly quick to jump to new formats: it introduced the D-50 portable CD player a year after the first compact discs were sold, and later rolled out MiniDisc and MP3 players under the Walkman brand. (Its insistence for several years on sticking to a proprietary digital music format, ATRAC, left it far behind Apple's iPod in terms of market share.) Since its launch, Sony has released more than 300 different models across all formats; it currently makes Walkman-branded MP3 players, phones and even portable DVD players. Its newest device, the Walkman NWZ-X1000, features...