2007 – 2010retired
GOOG-411
“Free 411, sweet talker — you dialed the world and never charged us a dime”
“It gave the world headphones as a lifestyle and never once asked us to share.”
The Walkman was Sony's portable cassette player, launched in 1979, and it became one of the defining gadgets of the 1980s. It offered something genuinely new: music that traveled with you, heard privately through headphones, fueling aerobics classes and a whole culture of individualized listening. So transformative was it that the Walkman effect entered the lexicon, the word itself made the Oxford English Dictionary
Its success helped push the Compact Cassette past vinyl in sales by 1983, and Sony eventually sold around 220 million cassette-based units before ending production in 2010. The brand didn't die so much as change clothes: since 2011, Walkman has referred exclusively to Sony's digital flash memory players. The original retires undefeated, its name still on the badge after more than four decades.
Spotted something wrong? Every fact on this page traces to a dated source. Fixes make the graveyard better for everyone.
“Free 411, sweet talker — you dialed the world and never charged us a dime”
“It streamed your songs, shared your playlists, and quietly became the future of Apple Music.”
“The serious one in the family, quietly keeping the servers running while everyone fawned over the desktop kids”