http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130818039
Well, we all know it’s been dead walking for a couple of years. 
How sad. I remember my first walkman. This beauty:
A hand-me-down of sorts from my older sister.
Shedding a tear today for sure.
Although, I still remember the day we got the Watchman:
Oh, man that made long car trips amazing.
Guess I need to hurry up and grab one while they’re still around. I still have a lot of tapes to put into digital format and the drive on my walkman is dead. I still have too much irreplaceable music on tape (underground music, live radio mix shows, etc…).
wow, I had no idea it hung on for so long.
well rest in piece, I had one growing up.
…where are those Danzig tapes again?
I’ll miss no-name brand walkmans that only had a fast-forward, and in order to save valuable battery life, rewinding cassettes by spinning them on a pencil, then listening to Van Halen get slower and slower because alkaline batteries were too expensive and the ‘heavy duty’ batteries lost their power steadily from the moment you first used them.
remember how cool you felt if you had a walkman with auto reverse and the fast forward that would auto seek gaps in songs… that was the future for 5 minutes.
Thats the one I got as a gift in 1984! Oddly had two volume sliders for L and R sides, and two headphone jacks.
Came with The Police Synchronicity and Talking Heads Stop Making Sense–which I now own as MP3’s.
I kept a cassette Walkman until about 2000 because that was still the only way to get DJ mixtapes.
Never had the sony ones… 
My parents insisted on buying panasonic electronics, which in their defense worked great, but it was just not the same.
(this was in the 90’s though… )
Thick as a brick and hideous, but extremely durable with some kind of vibrating headphones that ate batteries for breakfest.
Yes, I remember that.
I think SONYs idea was to pitch it as a shared experience.
Which is funny, considering that the iPod was all about the “you”.
Two things:
- Not sure which was more impressive-the size of the first walkmans or the sound of the headphones.
- The size of the smallest cassette Walkmans were about the size of the first iPods. Both seemed amazing for their size.
I worked basically a whole summer for this in the days. Built like a brick, excellent sound quality, two outputs. Mad expensive in the days, I still think it was worth it…
Then I got this, not particulary good…
Now I wish I had gotten this…
