Portable radios filled pockets in the 1950s, but when the first Sony Walkman personal stereo cassette player, the TPS-L2, went on sale for $150 on 1 July 1979, it would change the way we listened to music.
The Walkman was a modified version of its Pressman mono cassette recorder, which Sony had launched in 1978 and marketed to reporters. Sony chairman, Akio Morita, wanted a device to listen to opera on his trans-Pacific flights, so Sony engineer Nobutoshi Kihara removed the record function and speaker and replaced it with a stereo amplifier.
The TPS-L2 launched as the 'Soundabout' in America, the 'Stowaway' in the UK and 'Freestyle' in Australia and Sweden. But in Japan it was 'Walkman', and that’s the name that stuck.
Sony stopped selling the Walkman in 2010, the same year they stopped selling floppy discs, having sold 200,020,000 Walkman cassette players, and 400 million Walkmans of all variations.
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