According to CrunchGear, Sony is stopping production of the Walkman after selling 200m units over 30 years.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Walkman, this was, let’s say, the great-grandfather to the iPod. It made music portable for the first time in a (at the time) well-thought-out design with great headphones (foam ones, not ear buds). There were probably earlier players (Casio?), but this is the one that resonated with consumers.

It was barely larger than a cassette tape, and it really did much of what today’s iPods (sans shuffle) do: Allow you to make mix tapes, made music portable. Your “iTunes” store was your (your friends’, the library’s) albums that you “ripped” to the cassette tapes.

Before the Walkman, there were transistor radios that were, well, just radios, and had a single earpiece. The Walkman allowed the commuter, office worker etc to enjoy the music they had put on/purchased on tape in a private way (no boom box). Strap to your hip and skate/run and so on.

Today, of course, it looks ridiculous and…uh, what’s a cassette tape?…but at the time (1979 – yeah, Carter was still president!), it was revolutionary.

I’m not sure that I’m correct about this, but I seem to remember reading an article that said the Walkman – a HUGE success at the time – almost didn’t get made. The business ethos at Sony required consensus, and not everyone was on board. The president – or some product manager – took exception to this, and personally took ownership of the product: He would be the fall guy if it failed. He believed in it that much.

He was right.