Who Invented the Sony Walkman?

Walkman is the brand name of a portable audio cassette player manufactured by Sony. The introduction of the original version of the product altered the habits of consumers when it comes to music listening. Some of the products released by the company with the brand name are the Video Walkman, the Walkman MP3 player as well as the Network Walkman. From its development up to March 2007, the trademark remained popular to music lovers. To know more about the product, it is best to begin with identifying the person behind the development of the Sony Walkman.

 

History of the Trademark

Who invented the Sony Walkman? According to reports, the first walkman was developed and designed by Nobutoshi Kihara, an audio division engineer at Sony, in 1978. The product was created for the personal use of the company’s co-chairman Akio Morita. The executive requested Kihara to develop a portable music player that he can use to listen to classical songs during his trips. Because of the efficiency and high quality performance of the product, Sony decided to introduce the music player to the public. The first batch of Sony Walkman was released in Japan in 1979.

Additional Information and Other Important Details

 

The first version of the music device is known as the Walkman TPS-L2. The appearance of the device is very simple with the silver and blue theme. When the device was introduced in Great Britain, it came with various accessories such as mini headphone jacks and stereo playback. The product became popular because it allowed two individuals to listen to music at the same time. Aside from this, another special feature of the product is that it can be used to record conversations because it has a built-in microphone. However, this feature was phased out in the second version of the music player.

The competition among electronic devices companies heightened in the 1980s, which caused Sony to introduce a new version of the product. The WM-DD9 was introduced to the commercial market in 1989. The device has a disc drive system and it used a quartz-locked mechanism. In the 1990s, the portable cassette players produced by the company were limited because of the development of digital technologies such as MiniDisc and DAT. In 2005, Sony released a special music player bearing the brand name. The product was named Network Walkman HD1. One of the advantages of the product over other portable music players available at this time is that the item uses a hard disk to operate.