Sony Discontinues the Walkman 250
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.
Re:What a waste! (Score:1, Informative)
I think you need to learn how to count again. The last time I checked, 200 million (if counting the cassette-based units; 400m otherwise) was considerably less than 7 billion.
Re:Minor error (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks for the insightful comment. Everyone here at /. was at loss without this important clarification. Now can we get back to nostalgic memories of childhood days and leave silly pedantics alone for a few minutes?
Jesus, some people never quit.
BTW, "but not as poorly worded" is also a poorly worded sentence, but I'll leave it as an exercise for you to fix on your own. I don't believe in FTFYs.
Re:What a waste! (Score:1, Informative)
Home Taping is Killing Music (Score:2, Informative)
Obligatory YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3jkUhG68wY [youtube.com]
Re:Daddy what's a cassette? (Score:5, Informative)
>>>BetaMax ftw
Myth. VHS and Betamax have almost-identical specs (see below). In fact VHS has one advantage Betamax did not have: It could hold 10.5 hours per tape, while Betamax maxed-out at just 5.5 hours. VHS is the superior standard, and that's why it won.
VHS Bmax feature
yes yes Hi-Fi sound?
250 240 Lines of horizontal resolution (420 for Super VHS)
3.0 3.0 Luma Bandwidth in megahertz (5.5 for Super VHS)
0.6 0.6 Chroma Bandwidth
10+ 5.5 Hours of record time
Oh and before you mention professional usage, that's BetaCAM not betamax. Completely different format (like Mac vs. PC vs. Amiga floppies). While Betacam was superior to VHS, Betamax was not. It was mostly identical, or inferior (in terms of record time).
Re:Daddy what's a cassette? (Score:1, Informative)
It was also the first convenient format for file sharing.
I remember seeing a twin-deck walkman (it opened on each side) so that you could copy tapes on the move, while listening to them.
Re:No story about the Sony Walkman is complete... (Score:2, Informative)
Almost sounds like a patent troll to me. What's the likelihood that between him receiving the patent in 1977 in Italy of all places and Sony pushing out the first walkman in 1979 that sony actually ever looked at that patent? Unless they found out within the same month about the patent, immediately begin research and development, while at the same time having the factory set up to produce them before they were even designed... it seems unlikely that they "stole" anything. More like coincidence that more than one person thought of putting music on tape.
Huh... people still buy Sony products? (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting... I would have thought that the massive virus/rootkit/audio CD thing would have killed them by now. Or their yanking the plug on advertised features of their products. Or suing their users for using their products in innovative ways.
Whatever. Sony, you can pretty much do what you want. Anyone who is still a customer of yours evidently enjoys the pain.
Re:Didn't know they still made it. (Score:5, Informative)
You can always put music onto a cassette. Never hear the term "Mix Tape"?
No, no, *please* don't do that! As the campaign from the Walkman's glory days informed us....
;'-(
Home Taping is Killing Music... and it's Illegal. [wikipedia.org]
I still feel guilty about how copying some of my parents' LPs had caused the end of the music industry by 1988.
*cough*
Re:Daddy what's a cassette? (Score:3, Informative)
The longest readily available tape was the T-120. [..] 10.5 hours per tape sounds like a security tape setting. "At 10.15 this morning, a grey blob entered the store, and subsequently pulled out a dark gray blob, and brandished it at the cashier."
Well, you'd be surprised; I got a watchable 12 hours from my most recent (circa 2004) VHS recorder.
To be fair, this was a PAL model, and PAL tapes ran slower for some reason (*). However, by the early-90s, E-180 and E-240 tapes (**) were already widely available and the most common.
So I had a few E-240 tapes and used them on EP (one-third speed) which was actually quite watchable on a portable set; slightly inferior to standard play speed, but not as much as you'd expect. (***) 'Course even then I knew that I'd end up with a DVR sooner rather than later, so it was a bit late to get a machine with that nice perk.
(*) Don't know why, as AFAICT the total number of lines per second works out almost identical.
(**) *Blank* tapes are identical and interchangeable between NTSC and PAL, but the different speed- and hence running time- means it makes more sense to have different systems, e.g. an E-180 tape would be a T-129 on an NTSC machine.
(***) Though that model had Hi-Fi stereo, which didn't suffer as much due to the decrease in speed. Mono non-HiFi models had linearly-recorded sound which was signficantly degraded even at LP (half-speed) because the linear speed of the tape was *very* slow.
Re:Daddy what's a cassette? (Score:3, Informative)
The reason is 50 Hz frame rate for PAL and 60 Hz for NTSC.
The 50 Hz frame rate (half frames actually which leads to 25 full frames per second) is also the reason why cinema movies (which use 24 fps) are sped up on PAL video.
Re:Daddy what's a cassette? (Score:3, Informative)
>>>Betamax had slightly higher chroma bandwidth then VHS and stored a reference color burst on the tape.
That's BetaCAM not betamax. VHS and Betamax both used the same "color under" system, with just 0.6 MHz bandwidth. i.e. No difference. In fact some have claimed JVC simply stole a Betamax deck and copied its design, since they are near identical, but nobody's been able to prove it.
Another disadvantage Betamax had was the tape-handling system. In made rewinding and fast-forwarding a tedious process, and also prevented Sony from releasing a Betamax camcorder that could do instant playback (like VHS and VHS-C could do).
Re:What a waste! (Score:1, Informative)
No, just retarded.