When I was a child, everybody had a Walkman. I even remember the early models, because of the bizarre lack of a rewind button. For some reason this was a button too far and thus you had to take the tape out and fast-forward the other side.
Although I have a couple of models of cassette walkman in my collection of antique/retro audiovisual equipment, they have not been played for a long time. What I find odd is how nostalgic the cassette Walkman makes us, and the cassette itself (the subject of my first ever blog).
With this in mind, I was a little taken aback to read in the press that Sony have stopped production of the cassette Walkman. Stopped! A direct quote from The Independent says ‘The last batch of cassette Walkmans to be made in Japan have left factories, and production in China will also stop once existing orders in Asia and Europe have been met.’
The biggest surprise with this is that Sony was producing them in 2010, nine years after the first ipod, at all. Who was buying them? I reckon there was one man in the factory that did not turn up to the team meeting about the retraining to make ipod, and rebelliously plodded on making the tape Walkman. He sat making them in a little room, his bosses blissfully unaware that this was going on. A bit like Stan Laurel in Blockheads.
