By PHIL PATTON On the original model Sony Walkman, introduced twenty years ago this month under the trademark "Soundabout," was an orange button. The blue black plastic slab of the Model TPS-L2, which came with a leather case and headphones, played cassette tapes. But it also had a second earphone jack and when you pushed the orange button, the sound emerged into two sets of phones and two listeners could talk to each other through a microphone. It was a revealing feature: even Sony was apparently worried about the solitary qualities of the Walkman. The orange button was like a panic button, an emergency "share" feature. The company was that hesitant, Sony cofounder Akio Morita wrote later, to release a product that was somehow so selfish. The Walkman, of course was an immediate success. The orange button was removed, along with the Soundabout name. Competitors quickly introduced rival products, but Walkman became a synonym for any personal portable tape player. The device changed our relation to technology; its solitary, enveloping quality became its characteristic feature. The Walkman and its rivals quickly became a landmark in the history of media and a symbol of an inwardly focused era. "Personal sound" anticipated personal computers and personal digital assistants. Design historian Stephen Bayley calls it one of the most significant products of its time. It was stoon taken to stand also for the success of the Japanese economy, the skill of its engineers in miniaturization and it marketers in sales and packaging. It even evoked the Japanese tradition of design: the blue black case resembled a traditional Japanese lacquered box. >Now, after some 100 million of the devices have been sold, according to Sony's estimates—a count that does not include competitors in the "personal portable audio category," the Walkman is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Today it is close to commodity. A Walkman very much like the model that cost $200 twenty years ago is to be found for $20 blister-wrapped on discount or even drugstore chain shelves. And the basic blue black shape of the first model would evolve into many models and styles of Walkmans (Sony's preferred plural): personal sound demanded personal style. The virtuosity of the first Walkman was that it daringly exposed precise and precious technology to the perils of portability. But soon it became less imposing, as prices fell. Part accessory, part companion, the Walkman helped turn electronics into something like jewelry. Sony's ads showed a dancing Walkman with legs and arms, their hands gloved like Mickey Mouse or Michael Jackson. Robert Nell, Sony's vice president in charge of audio products, said that Walkman's achievement was that it "provided listeners with a personal soundtrack to their lives." Designer Stephen Holt of the design firm Frogdesign, which provided Sony alternative designs in the early days of the Walkman, agrees. "The Walkman for the first time provided ordinary people with a cinematic soundtrack for their daily lives," he says. "One result was that it brought a kind of spectacle to daily life and made humdrum activities feel cinematic." To some, it was a further sign, along with rock n roll and television of the decline of civilization. Mr. Holt recalls hearing and reading the sentiment in the early 1980s that the Walkman fostered dangerous isolation and immersion. That immersion soon led to traffic laws forbidding drivers to wear the devices, lest they fail to hear a crucial horn or siren.< Three decades ago the sociologist Edward Hall introduced the concept of the "space bubble," that culturally conditioned distance that dictates how close we stand to another person and how much space we need around us to feel comfortable. The Walkman might be said to have introduced another kind of bubble: a technogical bubble of concentration and obliviousness to surroundings, a private space in public. Today, the streets are full of cellular telephone users enveloped in similar bubbles of communication and concentration. Palm pilots and others small digital devices have similar effects. But the Walkman was the first to show the psychological effects: note how the mobile Walkman user boldly makes eye contact with other pedestrians, as if somehow unconsciously reasoning that because you cannot hear what he is listening to you also cannot see what he is looking at. And arriving at the beginning of the 80s, the Walkman seem to have signaled the beginning of a time of introspection, even narcissism. Michael Schiffer, author of The Portable Radio in American Life, (University of Arizona Press 1991) notes that the transistor radio with its single ear piece had initiated the idea of private portable music, with a streak of rock and roll rebellion to it. The key difference the Walkman brought, said Professor Schiffer, was to free the listener from dependence on the fixed programs of radio. Using the tape cassette first introduced in 1965 personalized the musical choice. People made tapes of their favorite music, but they also purchased prerecorded tapes. By 1983 the Walkman had helped push sales of cassette tapes past those for vinyl records. While most technological innovations today tend to turn on compression and combination of technologies, the Walkman turned on their simplification—and packaging. What first made the device possible was removing from a tape recorder the ability to record and the speaker to play aloud. There are many different accounts of the creation of the Walkman. One widely disseminated tale, in keeping with Japanese business practice of crediting the CEO, had Sony boss Akio Morita playing tennis and wishing he could have his music with him on the court. Another, which Richard Gioscia heard, featured Morita visiting a factory and talking to a worker who asked for tunes on the assembly line. (Here the CEO figures as benevolent boss.) But the most convincing account, pieced together from from Sony's own documents and Morita's autobiography, Made in Japan (E.P. Dutton, 1986.) Morita ascribed the idea to Masaru Ibuka, with whom he had cofounded the company. Ibuka was the more technical of the pair and often visited the development labs. He expressed frustration at not being able to carry his favorite music with him on airplanes. To please him, a Sony engineer named Shizuo Takshiro began with the Pressman, a popular tape recorder used by reporters. He removed the recording apparatus and speaker and added a stereo amplifier. The only real technical breakthrough was the development of light headphones, with their little sponge biscuits of earpieces. These were found in a lab next door. But the revealing part of Morita's tale comes when takes the prototype Walkman home. "I noticed my experiment was annoying my wife, who felt shut out," he reported in his book, and so he ordered the addition of a second headset jack—and the orange button. But while Mr. Morita reported that he "thought it would be considered rude for one person to be listening to his music in isolation," people did not share, but bought their own units. (The only time I ever saw anyone push the orange button was in a movie. Jim Jarmusch's 1989 Mystery Train shows a young Japanese couple arriving in Memphis by rail—sharing on a Walkman the blues and rock music that has lured them to the Southern city. What is interesting about the scene is that sharing the earphones was unusual it served to sketch character: it showed the couple tightly bound, isolated together in an alien land. ) Sony's sales staff worried that no one would buy a tape recorder that could only play, not record. Mr. Morita insisted on it. Car stereo players didn't record and no one minded, he pointed out. His insight anticipated a quality of the Walkman: it would become a kind of car stereo for the pedestrian. To be sure, Walkman technology has improved a great deal. The first Walkman could run for eight hours on a single charge of its batteries; today's can run for sixty. To produce the sound on the go, tape would be succeeded by portable CD and digital audiotape. From the Walkman would spring the Discman and the Watchman, or small television. Today's Minidisc, a format that has still not caught on entirely, and portable MP3 devices to play songs downloaded form the Internet, continue the tradition. Different media, same message. And the simple box has turned into hundreds, perhaps even thousands of different shapes and colors. Designer Richard Gioscia, head of Sony's design
center in Park Ridge, New Jersey has seen the Walkman take all sorts of
forms over the last fifteen years.
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