Today the Walkman was buried

The cassette walkman is dead! As you can read everywhere today, the Japanese electronics group Sony has stopped producing its legendary mobile cassette player «Walkman». This ends the history of the Walkman after more than 30 years. Tape technology was long outdated anyway - Sony made the first one in 1979 - but the Walkman still evokes romantic feelings and nostalgic memories to this day. In the 80s, the Walkman shaped a whole generation and I'm reminiscing a little bit right now.

As far as I know, I've never owned a "real" Walkman, my first was a black box made entirely of plastic, with a much too large transparent lid and bulky buttons. In contrast, the Sony device was metal, some metallic hue, with round, elegant control knobs protruding half a centimeter. For us teenagers, the small, hand-flattering miracles of technology wrapped in aluminum were, to a certain extent, the Ferrari for 14-year-olds, since the parts were not exactly cheap, and at the end of the 80s the better models easily cost 300 francs and that was quite a lot Coal for a pocket money budget. Yes, back then the Walkman was a status symbol, much like cell phones are today.

Hach, those were the days when people were still talking shop about the band quality of various blank cassette manufacturers, with or without Chrome, and the greatest difficulty when copying an album was the fact that a 45 minute album usually lasted longer and therefore not on one page 90s cassette fit ... I well remember the grumpy older women with evil looks and whispered comments, if you, as a music lover, sit on the bus in self-selected isolation - signaled by the foam headphones on your ears - it was definitely for the older generation an act of open rebellion. But you didn't have to hear anything

After a while, my pseudo Walkman began to rattle terribly, so that you didn't really want to listen to it anymore and so the next one had to be here, this time a little better quality, but still not the original and also there ... Solved this problem completely the digital music player - with the iPod, Apple created an icon that made the Walkman a historical relic, an ambassador of the analogue past that has become more than superfluous. Let's see what happens when the iPod celebrates its 21th birthday in 30 years. You will probably then read nostalgic swan songs on dedicated music players, because our portable multimedia Internet supidub devices will then be responsible for everything at once, for music and films, text and games, making coffee and shaving ...