Walkman

Walkman is Sony’s line of portable audio players, launched in 1979. Its lightweight cassette models made private music listening practical while walking, commuting, and traveling.

Compact Cassette: A magnetic-tape audio format housed in a small reversible plastic cartridge. The cassette supplied the Walkman’s portable recordings and helped define its original design.
Sony: A Japanese electronics and entertainment company founded in 1946 as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Sony developed, manufactured, and marketed the Walkman line.
Personal stereo: A portable audio system designed for one person to hear music privately through headphones. The Walkman helped make the personal stereo a familiar consumer-device category.
Walkman effect: The practice of using portable headphones to create a private listening space within public surroundings. The Walkman made this shift in attention and social presence a defining feature of portable music.
Headphones: Personal audio transducers worn on or in the ears to deliver sound directly to one listener. Headphones let Walkman users listen privately without a loudspeaker.
Masaru Ibuka: A Japanese engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Sony with Akio Morita. Ibuka’s desire for a lightweight player for recorded music helped prompt the first Walkman.
Portable media player: A mobile device that stores or plays audio and sometimes other digital media. Later portable players inherited the Walkman’s model of music carried for individual use.
Headphone culture: Social practices and meanings associated with listening through personal headphones. Walkman use helped normalize headphones as everyday public accessories.
Sony TPS-L2: Sony’s first Walkman, a portable stereo cassette player released in Japan in 1979. This model established the product’s basic cassette-and-headphone experience.
Akio Morita: A Japanese entrepreneur who co-founded Sony and led its international expansion. Morita backed the Walkman’s launch and helped shape its market positioning.

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