Who launched the Walkman?
The first WALKMAN.
The first WALKMAN was launched in Japan by Sony on 1 July 1979 at a price of Y 33,000 (0 165). Its development followed a failed attempt to adapt the monaural Sony Pressman, a miniature tape recorder for journalists, to stereo. Sony engineers succeeded in coverting it to stereo playback, but only at the expense of its recording function. With a tape recorder which could not record, Sony’s Tape Recorder Division was ready to abandon the project. The idea of adding lightweight headphones came from Sony’s Honorary Chairman Masura Ibuka, the founder of the company, and the stimulus to develop a product which no one else in the company believed in except Ibuka himself and Chairman Akio Morita, who saw it as a means of gratifying teenagers’ constant need for loud music. (Legend has it that he was fed up with the racket from his own children’s hi-fi). In fact, it failed to catch on with teenagers at the outset; the initial market for the Walkman was young, affluent professionals for whom recorded music had been a pervasive influence all their lives. It was introduced into the USA in December 1979 as the `Soundabour and to the UK in February 1980 as the ‘Stowaway’.
