the.com/walkman
the box that made solitude portable and turned every sidewalk into a private movie soundtrack.
means A pocket-sized portable cassette player with headphones, made by Sony, that let people listen to music privately while moving around.
from A Sony coinage from 1979, stitching plain English "walk" and "man" into a brand name — Japanese-English compounds like this were already a Sony habit. The grammar bothered some English speakers, so it briefly traveled under other names abroad ("Soundabout" in the US, "Stowaway" in the UK) before "Walkman" won everywhere. The name stuck so hard it became a near-generic word for any portable player, and Sony famously argued over its plural — settling on "Walkman Personal Stereos" rather than risk "Walkmen."
- name origin
- Japanese-English coinage; Sony fought to keep it
- first model
- 1979 TPS-L2 had two headphone jacks
- shared listening
- early units let two people listen together
- sales
- over 400 million cassette units sold worldwide
- final cassette
- Japan stopped making them in 2010
sony walkman — portable cassette player released by sony in 1979, sold over 200 million units
apple ipod — digital music player that replaced the walkman, launched in 2001 with 5gb storage