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.
Sneakernet was definitely better than the Internet in some ways.
We're talking early 80's here, people hadn't heard of the internet back then (and that thing named WWW didn't exist yet). Wiki says the BSA didn't exist either (founded 1988), and software industry was still in its infancy - copyright issues included. So in the context of audio tapes, your comment makes no sense.
Also IIRC it was quite common to tape directly from vinyl -> audio cassettes. It's not that the original records were especially rare or expensive, and (since analog) every intermediate step means lower quality tape recording. More likely reel-to-reel tape was used to prevent records from wearing out quickly.