Slashdot Mirror
Sony Discontinues the Walkman
Ponca City writes "Crunchgear reports that after selling 200,020,000 units worldwide since its inception over thirty years ago, Sony has announced that it is pulling the plug on the manufacture and sales of the Walkman, the world's first portable (mass-produced) stereo. Magnetic cassette technology had been around since 1963, when Philips first created it for use by secretaries and journalists, but on July 1, 1979, Sony Corp. introduced the Sony Walkman TPS-L2, a 14 ounce, blue-and-silver, portable cassette player with chunky buttons, headphones, a leather case, and a second earphone jack so that two people could listen in at once. The Walkman was originally introduced in the US 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 so Sony eventually decided on 'Walkman' as a play on the Sony Pressman, a mono cassette recorder the first Walkman prototype was based on. 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 as Sony continued to roll out variations on its theme with over 300 different Walkman models, adding such innovations as AM/FM receivers, bass boost, and auto-reverse on later models and even producing a solar-powered Walkman, water-resistant Sport Walkman, and Walkmen with two cassette drives." For now, at least, the Walkman brand lives on for some of Sony's media players and phones.
It was also the first convenient format for file sharing.
Reel-to-reel tape decks were "servers" to which vinyl records were ripped. Sneakernet took care of the logistics.
Now help me find my lawn...
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
... without this link: Finally after 20 years of court battles, the electronics giant agrees to pay the inventor of the device that made its success.
In manufacturing, the Walkman was notable for its construction. It was designed for automated vertical assembly. In vertical assembly, all components are inserted by simple robots which move straight down to add a part to the base. The base is designed to support and align the parts so that this simple approach to assembly will work. It's fast, cheap, and fully automated.
Apple tried vertical assembly briefly. The Macintosh IIci was designed for vertical assembly. The power supply went in vertically and clicked into the motherboard. No internal cables. Then they went over to outsourced manual assembly with cheap labor. Swatch watches also used vertical assembly. Simpler cell phones are often assembled in this way.