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In July 1979, mobile technology was born in Tokyo. It wasn’t the Internet or the mobile phone. It was the Sony Walkmen that transformed the way we experience the world.

Sources:
Episode Sources:
https://www.businessinsider.com/history-listening-to-music-recorded-walkman-2019-6?r=US&IR=T#in-1981-the-new-york-times-wrote-that-the-cassette-player-was-the-most-eagerly-wished-for-of-all-gifts-the-device-allowed-people-to-not-only-listen-to-recorded-music-but-easily-make-their-own-recordings-too-this-gave-birth-to-the-mixtape-era-in-which-people-could-record-songs-they-heard-on-the-radio-10
https://mymodernmet.com/?p=218368
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/7/7/20683049/retro-bluetooth-cassette-tape-player-kickstarter
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/loud-and-clear/
https://pitchfork.com/news/bjork-reissuing-all-9-albums-as-multicolor-cassettes/

Episode Excerpt:
We’re celebrating the 40th anniversary of a technology that half of our listeners have never heard of, let alone used.
We’re celebrating a milestone.
A pivotal moment in the development of mobile technology.
A direct descendant of the smartphones we have in our pockets today.
A machine that changed the way people behaved.
And made the sight of headphones in public a common occurrence.
This is also a bit of a personal one for me.
A technology that shaped my teenage years and put me on the path to sitting here with you on this show.

Your first mobile phone?
No. Tbh, my first mobile wasn’t even a big moment.
My first phone was an Ericsson that was rebadged in the UK as an Orbitel.
I think it was 1994 or 1995.
Phones were starting to appear on the high street by then.
It wasn’t just yuppie swines that carried them.
Big hearty men of the people like myself also had them in our pockets.

You mean Geeks?
Don’t be rude.
I had a gym membership as well.
It was kinda cool to have one. Part of the reason I had one was to stay in touch with my younger brother, who’d just started a university course after being ill for a couple of years.
I’d recently graduated I was doing a lot of not doing very much in different parts of the country.
And, because calls were so expensive, I hardly ever used it.
Weirdly, I think the coverage back on those old analogue networks in the part of the UK where my parent live was better then than it is today.
At my mum’s house you need to be on different networks in different rooms in the house.
I think they’ve been barely touched by 3G yet, let alone LTE.

Where do they live, in a cave?
It’s flat and below sea level.
I could go into technical reasons as to why there are cellphone dead spots all over the area but I won’t because we’re hear to talk about the walkman.
I only mention the phone stuff because there’s an intersection.
Most of my phones up until the smartphone era were Ericsson models.
Latterly Sony Ericsson models.
And Sony is where today’s story starts.
With the Walkman.

I know this i