Another piece of my childhood bids adieu

As I inch towad another full revolution around the sun (birthday is tomorrow), I start thinking about how old I am and the things that I enjoyed that kids these days (shakes cane vigorously from my front porch rocker ) either recall their older siblings using or never heard of before. Today as I surf the net, I find another example:

The Walkman will no longer be produced once the current supply runs out. In honor of this solemn occasion, I'd like to call upon my fellow gray manes to offer up their favorite memories surrounding this iconic piece of technology. I'll go first.

My favorite memory of using a Walkman was using one to listen to a taped copy of Monty Python's Final Rip-off with my friends as we went camping. We'd share headphones listening to the Dead Parrot sketch and scenes from our favorite movie, The Holy Grail. Every morning we'd hook the Walkman up to some external speakers and blast SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM while we fried up some special ham and woke our fellow camping crew.


/salute, Sony Walkman.

My defining memory of the Walkman Era is rewinding cassettes by sticking a #2 pencil through the spindle and whirling them around by hand to save the batteries.

RIP Sony Walkman, long live its spiritual MP3 offspring!

Happy pre-birthday and I'm sorry for your loss.

Oh my, thats genius Goat. I wore out 3 walkmans by rewinding. Doh!

Naturally they were inferior products made by other companies.
My original Sony Walkman bought in 1987 is still working like a charm. Still has the battery cover too!

My only prominent Walkman memory was seeing the ads for them, and wishing I could afford one back in my high school years.

My Walkman memory is having one while I backpacked through Europe in the summer of 1987. I didn't take enough tapes.

I didn't have one. :/

I did have cassette players and Record players (what's a "record"?) and for whatever reason I still own some 8 tracks, but never really had a functional player for them.

I'll stick to my USB turntable.

I got proficient in changing tapes on the fly while riding my tenspeed to school.

I didn't have a Walkman per se in college, I think mine was an Awia(?). I still own my Sony Discman. But Sony's insistence in using their own compression format and memory device format doomed them in the MP3 player market.

I remember I had one with two headphone sockets, so you could share the music with somebody. It was considered an amazing thing...

Walkman, ah I remember those. Great times listening to mixed tapes during the school bus trips, family road trips, and home to kill the time.

Wow, seems like not that long ago that I first saw a discman. The whole concept of compact discs was still new to me; never even heard of them until I got to college. Went on exchange in France, and a Swiss student staying in the same house gave the landlord a Sony discman as a gift.

What? A portable CD player? The very concept blew my mind...

Ok, maybe not a walkman story, but whatevah

I remember when Sony first put in auto-reverse on their walkman. It was a sublime feature.

Oh man do I feel old.

My fave memory of that era related to this, not so much the Walkman, which I loved, but going away for the week with my friends with a cheap, plasticky briefcase that held cassettes in. Everyone else had about 2 r 3 cassettes in their pockets....I arrived with about 50, all of the latest songs recorded off the radio by my dad who recorded the top 40 every week.

Man, was I popular for that week