Byte by Bite

Before the iPod came the Walkman

by Marv Dealy

That man was Dr. Masaru Ibuka, co-founder of Sony Corporation. In the late 1970s, if you wanted portable sound with personal headphones you were limited to monaural (as in not stereo, grasshopper) sound.

Sony introduced the TC-D5 stereo portable tape player in 1978, but it was expensive at 100,000 yen (then 180 to the US dollar, or about $550 in then-dollars) and too heavy to really be portable. Ibuka asked for a simpler, play-back-only version of the Pressman, a small, mono-only tape recorder and playback unit that had been introduced in 1977. They removed the recording function and added the ability to play stereo music and found on trying it out that the sound was pretty good.

Ibuka took the odd combination of small playback unit and the very large headphones with him on his next trip to the United States.

A prototype with large headphones.

http://www.sony.net/Fun/SH/1-17/h2.html

His staff had feverously rushed around to find two extra batteries (which were of a special type) for the trip, as well as a collection of classical music tapes. Ibuka called his office from the U.S. saying that the batteries went dead on the plane and he couldn’t find any in the U.S. It turned out the tapes had been blank, as well.

Despite all this, Ibuka was impressed with the device, even though it couldn’t record and had large, clunky headphones. Upon his return to Japan, he suggested that Akio Morita – Sony’s other co-founder and the then-Chairman of Sony – try them for the weekend.

Delighted with the sound – much different than listening to the same music through regular loudspeakers – Morita called a meeting in February 1979 at which he held up the prototype and said, “This is the product that will satisfy those young people who want to listen to music all day. They'll take it everywhere with them, and they won't care about record functions. If we put a playback-only headphone stereo like this on the market, it'll be a hit. Our target market is students and other young people. We must launch it before the summer vacation at a price similar to the Pressman, which means less than 40,000 yen.

That gave the assembled group of mostly young planners, publicity people and mechanical, design and electrical engineers a little over 4 months to develop the necessary systems, such as marketing and manufacturing.

Imagine yourself sitting in that meeting. Here’s the Chairman of Sony telling your group that you have 4 months to produce this device that, after discussion, the Chairman himself has decided would be priced at 33,000 yen, because it was then Sony’s 33rd year in business.

Morita purportedly told Ibuka that the prototype music player would “enable young people to listen to music anytime, anywhere. But the headphones are bigger than the device itself. Can’t we do something about that?” Ibuka reportedly remembered some talk months earlier of developing lightweight, open-air type headphones. (http://www.sony.net/Fun/SH/1-17/h4.html)

To Ibuka’s delight, the development of the light and compact H-AIR MDR3 headphones was just about finished in Sony’s research lab. It weighed 50 grams as opposed to the 400 or so grams most earmuff-type headphones weighed.

Despite protests that the name was an odd combination of English and Japanese, the name “Walkman” was chosen was chosen, supposedly influenced in part by the popularity of Superman at the time and the earlier release of Sony’s Pressman recorder/player. The announcement was made that the Walkman would go on sale July 1, 1979, just ten days after the four-month deadline set by Morita in the original meeting.

Sony’s staff had decided on an outdoor presentation of the Walkman, with people riding bicycles or roller skating while listening to music to display the machine’s use and versatility. The decision was made to try this type of presentation out on a bunch of magazine journalists, and on the appointed day they were herded aboard busses, handed a Walkman, and taken to a park where, after a brief welcome they were instructed to put on the headsets and push the play button.

The tape requested the journalists to observe several demonstrations people were making of riding bicycles and listening to the Walkmans. It must have been quite a site to onlookers, who couldn’t hear any sound and who couldn’t have had any idea how far this idea would travel in the next 25+ years.

Sales took off slowly, and Sony initiated a grassroots campaign, with young workers taking the Walkman to the streets, offering a listen to anyone who would take the time. There wasn’t any big TV push, but because everyone who listened to one had to have one the initial batch of 30,000 Walkman’s was sold out in less than two months from its introduction.

Sony planned to roll out the Walkman worldwide six months after it debuted, but doubts existed about the name. Plans were made to call it different things in other countries, such as “Soundabout” for the U.S. and “Stowaway” for the Brits. I can’t find information on what it was to be called in the then Soviet Union, but I’m guessing it wasn’t the “Freestyle” as in Sweden.

Morita was in Europe on business prior to the overseas launch, and was told by several folks that their kids had told them to ask “Please, where can I get a Walkman?” the name was already known worldwide, and Morita called headquarters to say that the Walkman should be sold under its original name.

In the next six years, Sony would go on to sell over 150,000,000 Walkmans. The iPod, introduced October 23, 2001, sold some 20,000,000 in its first four years, and reports vary but seem to indicate about 42,000,000 sold by early January of this year, apparently not on pace to get anywhere near what the original Walkman sold.

A complete history of Sony, going back to when Morita – the son of a successful sake brewer – joined Ibuka and founded Tokyo Telecommunications engineering in 1946 can be found at http://www.sony.net/Fun/SH/

Younger readers today won’t remember that the company, which became Sony in 1958, also bought the rights to the transistor from General Electric and in 1957 introduced a pocket-sized transistor radio – quite the thing in its day I do remember. Sony went on to bring out products such as the compact disc player, the Trinitron TV and the digital audio tape player.

Sony was the first Japanese electronic manufacturer to make TVs in the United States, and went on to acquire CBS records in 1987 and Columbia Pictures in 1989, spending a total of $5.4 billion for those purchases. That’s a lot of Walkmans.

Apple, by the way, just announced it increased the number of desktop computers sold 55% from the previous year, with sales of Mac Minis and iMac G5s combined more than doubling. Sales of portables were up a third – I’m here to tell you that the new Mac portable dubbed the MacBook Pro will steal even more hearts, if they get anywhere near one.

I’m in the process of installing Windows XP on one, and will report how this adventure goes. But back to the Walkman.

I remember using them and similar items – personal headphone equipped FM radios were hot – while sailing on San Francisco Bay, riding a motorcycle across the Bay Bridge and other sensible activities. Ultimately, I quit using them as I just didn’t like not hearing what was going on around me. Some would say that what’s left of my hearing would also be gone, had I continued using a music source blasting right into my ears at high volume for hours every day. Speak up, I can’t hear you – you’re mumbling.