The Walkman, Forty Years On | Hacker News Reader

The Walkman, Forty Years On

newyorker.com

153 pointskwindla126 comments

Reminds me of how much Sony (along with Braun) shaped Apple’s hardware design language. And that in turn keeps on shaping many others.

And the walkman is arguably one of the classic cases of “build it, and they will come”, where a product was well ahead of what consumers were already calling for. In my mind, that’s the kind of thing actually deserving the visionary label.

> And the walkman is arguably one of the classic cases of “build it, and they will come”, where a product was well ahead of what consumers were already calling for.

Indeed, wonder if they used any parts of UX design/research. Was that even such a thing then?

No, that’s stuff we invented recently. Before it was just jam it in a box and see if it works.

Heh

They had round green buttons labeled “●POWER” since those days I think.

Not all Sony devices has green power buttons but if there’s a button labeled in green it powers up by pressing that.

It was called industrial design in those days.

https://www.jamesbutters.com/ has various examples of transistor radio designs, which could be considered Walkman predecessors.

Ha! The Sony "Pacemaker".

And to think some of those were actually built stateside... Now even Japan mfgs a lot of their products overseas.

And if you’re old enough, you may have experienced a SW transistor radio With a single mono earpiece giving you that feeling of being real time personally connected to the world far, far away from home. A precursor to the feeling of connecting to a far away BBS (bulletin board systems) and eventually the Internet.

It's quite interesting that all both the Thinkpad and the Mac are inspired in different ways from what could broadly be called the 'Japanese aesthetic'.

I dunno.

I think the solution space is extremely constrained.

What else is there for these devices other than some variation of rectangles and radii.

I swing the other way, I want more choices with greater variance.

If you want something rugged that won't fly out of your hand but also reasonably spec'd, your choices are limited.

Forget anything from Apple.

Ok, you can have a ruggedised case as a clip-on-around extra, but if you want a rugged case with bigger battery and a physical keyboard, forget it.

Today's designs are extremely limited, it's all just a scale of progressively more fragile until you're buying something that looks more like jewellery or a display-case item. Fine China even.

And! The goal posts keep moving. You look at new devices, find something you like and think "okay, I can probably afford a secondhand one of those from two years ago" - nope, doesn't exist.

And the same applies in reverse:

You like the device from two years ago, and are prepared to splurge on new: NOPE! They don't make that combination any more.

It's like a dystopian choose your own adventure.

You can choose from any of the following one bullshit option.

Maybe I'm just a malcontent.

Yes, you are a malcontent.

You can buy a ton of iPhone battery cases and get exactly what you want.

As for ruggedness of the device itself - the current devices are way more solid than the first gen big screen devices. Most of them are even waterproof.

If you don't want a big screen, you can buy some phones that will survive anything - check out phones by CAT.

I remember feeling like I was living in the future every time I listed to music on my Sony MiniDisc player while friends where still using their portable CD players with easily scratched disks before mp3 players became affordable and ubiquitous in high school.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc

That was an "ignorance is bliss" time, when everyone was enchanted by the sleek design of the MiniDisc and its players. But once MP3 took off, everyone started talking about lossy compression, and people suddenly realized that the ATRAC codec used in the 1990s MiniDisc players was flawed, and often said to be comparatively poor.

Not so lucky here. hated minidiscs from the moment I bought a recorder. I got an imported MZ-R90, fairly late into the cycle expecting maturity, which would persistently overheat when recording for some reason. Playback was reliable however but the limited ability to record meant that I only listened to about 5 discs worth of music for about 5-6 years. Prerecorded minidiscs were prohibitively expensive and very limited in availability in the UK as well.

Eventually, as I was stubborn as hell, it got replaced by an iPod shuffle when they first came out. Bar a stupid couple of weeks with an awful Sony Ericsson phone it’s been Apple all the way since.

Freedom from having to maintain and record media is the biggest win though over time, not the hardware. Apple Music saves me hours a week managing music for 5 people in my family.

I remember the kids who had minidisc players. Usually spoiled cause they were expensive and didn't have much prospect for future use, so it took parents who didn't mind wasting money. And typically used it to feel superior to other kids, cause it was different and apparently didn't skip. (My best friend had one, and he was pretty spoiled - we abused it trying to make it skip - they definitely do skip if you hit them hard enough). But kind of disappointed when it came to actually finding music to listen to. While the MiniDisc might have been superior tech, it doesn't really matter if record companies won't produce media for it. I'd make fun of my friend for having a player that didn't skip but not having any music for it.

If I remember correctly, it wasn't the mp3 player that made the MiniDisc a nonstarter format, it was CD burners that came out a few years before mp3 players that actually did it.

I remember when we were all rocking walkmans/aiwas and just accepted the mediocre sound quality of our mix tapes. CDs were ubiquitous but most portable players were prone to skipping and there was no economic way to create mix tapes on CDs for us. The day I bought a portable Sharp mindisc recoder and created the my first digital CD to Mindisc mix via an optical connection was eye opening. I cannot overstate what a game changer it was in creating portable CD quality mixes.

Quite ironically, these days you can get audio processing plugins for DAWs (digital audio workstations), which lower the quality of your audio to emulate the lower audio quality of cassette tapes.

> And the walkman is arguably one of the classic cases of “build it, and they will come”, where a product was well ahead of what consumers were already calling for.

I was born much after its release, but I have to say I find this surprising. Cassette players were popular with car commuters, why wouldn't it have been obvious that they would be with train or bus commuters?

Size and weight, usually 2 or 3 double A batteries and mono sound because intended for a single speaker output. To listen privately you'd have a phone in one ear. Deeply unsatisfactory experience. Walkman was a huge step forward

Dude (or dudette), you missed the Boombox era.

It. Was. Awesome.

But the portability was hit or miss. And the boom part could be a problem in certain situations.

Thus the need for a much smaller (more portable), and more personal (headphones) device.

(edit) This is how awesome it was (though I'm experiencing youtube errors atm):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xcrLbic1_o

I recently had an opportunity to check out a drive-in movie theatre, and was very excited at the idea until I remembered that the FM radio in our car was messed up (we never use it). I dug through the garage and found my old Walkman still in a pile of high school stuff. Cleaned it up, installed batteries, cycled the volume rheostat until it was cleaned up and the static stopped...and POOF perfect FM radio again! I brought headphones and had a great time.

Way to go. :-) You reminded me, I bought a couple of those little rechargeable FM transmitters recently and was surprised to find that they're so much simpler than Bluetooth in a lot of ways. I haven't used any of my portable BT speakers in a few weeks now, because it's easier to pipe audio from my phone through to a nearby radio.

My Walkman stopped getting security upgrades in 1984.

This was an issue long before 1984. It's shocking by today's standards, but the portable transistor radios dating from the 1950s never received any security updates in their lifetime!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio

I confess to being ignorant of how a security update could possibly apply to a transistor radio.

Was it a joke?

Yes.

The authors spoke a common notion on how there exists no valid excuse for the prevalence of "mandatory security updates" for appliances by shedding light on how few (possibly zero) of these gadgets from a bygone era possessed either firmware or the need to "update" it.

Yes, I confess that I was just riffing on cbm-vic-20's clever comment.

An original Sony Walkman had nothing in it that could ever require a "security update". It had no network access, no wireless connection, and as far as I know no microprocessor, nothing that could ever enable someone to hack into it - unless they had physical access and were skilled at soldering.

Even more so, the transistor radios from the 1950s were just simple circuits with as few as five transistors. Now these were radio receivers, so by modern standards you might worry about someone hacking into them. But with five transistors all soldered together on a simple circuit board, it would be difficult for an attacker to send a signal that would somehow reprogram the radio.

Maybe a lightning bolt though! That could cause a permanent denial of service.

It has a volume that is dangerous for the ears. Much louder max volume than we have in devices today. Could motivate an "update"

Painfully funny joke. I've got a little chefs steps sous vide that will become worthless the day the company goes out of business and the app is pulled from the store. Despite just needing a temperature and time setting it relies on a phone app and somehow requires an update every single time I use it =/

This is the most beautiful one-liner nerd joke I’ve ever read. Thank you.

Was the firmware at that time complex enough that you can attempt an OTA brick? Are radios from 1984 mostly analogue?

They were made entirely of electrical and electronic parts, didn't need firmware , and almost always could be repaired.

Just to be a pedant, the android phone I am typing this on is also made entirely out of electrical and electronic parts as well. In fact, arguably this device contains a greater degree of those parts, as the only electromechanical parts are speakers, a vibration motor, and 3 tact switches.

A simple radio will have a speaker, slide switch for power, potentiometer for volume, and either a potentiometer or variable cap for tuning.

Although I do agree, the operative words there are 'simple' and 'no firmware'. ;)

NASA Apollo 13 team did intentionally brick S-IVB upperstage radio downlink so that frequency auto-calibration goes way off so it won’t interfere with the rescue operation.

That auto-calibration system probably was a series of analog opamp circuits, so if that’s the case they managed to OTA brick a complex enough analog radio.

It would be entirely analogue in the signal path; radios didn't become digital until DAB. Although some acquired microprocessor front panel controls in maybe the 90s.

Their security upgrades only worked over 300 baud acoustic-coupler modems.

You certainly won't see that level of quality today.

It's all about planned obsolescence nowadays.

check AliExpress. I brought a great radio that is also an alarm clock and a Bluetooth speaker for $10. Excellent hardware (not so excellent ux)

There's a big community of ambient/electronic musicians that are still using these things. They are popular for recording/playing tape loops and making tape delays. I bought some recently to convert into a makeshift mellotron (they still run ~$15 on ebay!). [1] Also there seems to still be enough demand to fund kickstarters for new fancy cassette players. [2]

[1]: https://schollz.com/blog/tape-synth/

[2]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wearerewind/we-are-rewi...

Dang missed the opportunity back and get one by days.

Looks like they're still accepting pre-orders on their site: https://www.wearerewind.fr/product-page

Thank you!

I still have a fondness for how the walkman's motors would slow down as the batteries died which caused a slowing of the sound. The beauty of analog. Today's digital equipment stops cold once voltage gets below threshold.

Along the lines of the melotron, I wonder if you could hook up a pot connected to the battery inputs to manually adjust the voltage so you could control this slowing down effect. I could see it working to lower the voltage, but would these things speed up by applying a higher voltage than normal?

I just found my Aiwa HS-JX779 in perfect condition the other day. It was maybe the best prosumer portable cassette player/recorder ever made.

Why not use a Sony MiniDisc player to record and loop?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc

More convenient digital samplers exist, avoiding those is the entire point

Some are even still selling their music in cassette format. [1]

[1]: https://boninibulga.bandcamp.com/album/sealed

Sony TC-50 is a cassette recorder that could be considered as a predecessor to the Walkman; it even went to the moon with the Apollo 11 crew [1].

[1]: https://kottke.org/19/07/sonys-proto-walkman-that-went-to-th...

Off-topic question:

Since this is a thread on Walkman I'd like to ask you on any dedicated music player that you'd recommend?

I suggest an external DAC for your phone unless you have very specific requirements; I use a iFi iDSD Nano (which is no longer being made, but there are equivalent models), what's best for you depends on your use case (what kind of headphones or speakers would you use?).

Cool link! Regarding music players, I personally switched to simpler/less-costly solutions because I do a lot of hiking and I can get caught in sudden storms or just end up dropping things. Along those lines I tried a lot of agptek devices and they've been really good.

http://www.agptek.com/index.php/product-category/portable-au...

I got myself a WM-701C [0], which was considered to be the pinnacle of Walkman design at the time. Incredibly thin with a 'remote control' in the headphone cord.

Mine was heavily used as I did about 20km/day on a bike ( in NL this is just commute + paper round, nothing special ) for quite a few years.

I had some trouble finding it, but hey on the internet everything exists, the Walkman Archive!

[0] http://www.walkman-archive.com/gadgets/walkman_sony_05_701c_...

I won a WM-701C from WIQB in Ann Arbor, MI when I was a kid! Mine was the 10th Anniversary silver edition which was amazing.

Was the Walkman any better than its competitors? I was only a toddler at the time but a few years later EVERYONE made personal cassette players, at way lower prices than Sony.

But it wasn’t like with a generic “MP3 player”, a generic cassette player wasn’t really missing anything that the Walkman had (except for the very low end models that were in the cheapest price bracket). I remember one model that only had reverse and not fast forward, for example.

I was really into skateboarding from about 12 years old to 30. But back in the day I used to buy the Sony Sport Walkman's. The big yellow ugly ones.

When I would skate I had the Walkman in my left hand at all times. I used to fall a lot and learned to land on the Walkman. It became instinct to cover my glasses with my right forearm and land with my left hand so the Walkman took the hit. For anyone wondering my fingers didn't grip all the way around the Walkman so I didn't grind my fingernails off when I landed.

But those things were tanks. I bought the OG 5GB iPod when it came out and that completely changed the way I skated since I didn't have the trusty Walkman to fall on.

But that was also around the time I started to listen to more Hip Hop like Slick Rick so my entire style changed to a smoother more technical skate compared to when I was listening to Reagan Youth all day and just flinging myself off sets of stairs.

They were the IPhones of the time. More expensive, more fashionable, perceived higher quality, and had innovative features such as auto reverse. The average cassette player was the generic Android in comparison.

perceived higher quality

Wasn't it (also) actual higher quality then most if not all of the competition in the same price range?

Yes that too.

Those tiny Aiwas that eventually miniaturized to hardly bigger than a cassette case were a very successful challenger brand in my circles, to the point that Sony brand walkmen practically ceased to exist. It was either an Aiwa or a cheap noname during those last years before everything switched to digital.

But the brand went through that surprisingly unscathed, they might have dropped the ball on late generation cassette innovation, but after the switch to organise CD the Sony brand discman was again perceived as solidly recommendable.

Pulling up some Walkman/Discman designs from Sony, Aiwa, Panasonic (etc) just makes me want to buy one.

Somewhere after the IPhone 4/5, phone designs started to homogenize into that mostly large screen, rounded corners, and mostly became uninteresting.

Business laptops have mostly settled on the MacBook design, Gaming laptops are still coming in weird interesting designs:

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Zephyrus-i7-7700HQ-Processor-Pro...

I agree, a lot of the old designs really had something special. I was looking through an old emergency backpack recently and found an Aiwa HS-SP590, similar to a Walkman. For quite a few years it was kind of boring as tech, but now it's so unique that my kids are very intrigued. I'm thinking I'll put something else in the backpack and have a play. (Ideally there weren't any batteries left inside...)

I seem to recall the Aiwas tended to have EQ on the front, sometimes lined up diagonally. My first "Walkman" was a Toshiba (so technically it wasn't a Walkman) model from 1984, one of the first that came with a FM/AM cassette that you had to insert where the tape usually would go. It also was one of the first models with auto-reverse. This little guy: http://www.walkman-archive.com/wa/project/toshiba-kt-as1-bra...

There was a post on HN the other day where the Instagram algo was discussed - look at something once and see it for the next three weeks.

Oddly, at some point it's decided I like to see pictures of old hifi equipment and Walkmans in particular. Turns out there's a massive community of collectors and displayers, and the pictures are actually pretty great.

It also reminded me just how great 'tech' was back then. I was a kid in the 80s and a teen in the 90s and it brought back memories of just how magical it all felt! Technology didn't feel like it was iterating as quickly, and things like a tiny Walkman with tiny earbud headphones playing a tape of a new band your friend had found, in a world that wasn't instant and connected - was everything.

...I remember when all this was fields... Sigh.

Somewhat related.

How far are we on having wireless earpods/earphones streaming music directly from the satellites? No phones or internet required.

Why not use FM radio? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HMH0ZC

No on-demand songs though!

I wonder if it is possible to broadcast every songs out there and have a software switch frequencies as required.

I don't think you realise just how many songs are "out there".

And switching to a given song's frequency wouldn't be the same as being able to listen on-demand: you'd rarely happen to catch it such that you start listening at the beginning.

OnRad.io[1][2] lets you search for any song on their sources for internet radio and if it’s available, you can stream it from any of the matches. It’s the only thing I’ve seen which does this in real-time. I wish you could add arbitrary streams to search from. I think Winamp could do this back in the day, but not sure of other app based solutions for this.

Kind of the reverse of what you may mean by broadcasting every song, but if the songs are already being broadcast, tune in.

[1] http://www.onrad.io

[2] https://rainnews.com/onrad-io-launches-with-searchable-share...

I don't know about where you live, but where I am in Canada the majority of FM radio is as bad or worse than cable television; constant ads, stale "radio friendly" music and DJ's with inane banter and making bad jokes. It's painful to listen to.

And don't forget the mandated CanCon that radio stations have to play.

I don't know about where you live

It really depends more on what you're into than where you live since so many radio stations stream.

There are plenty of great radio stations out there still, but on the internet people think it's cool to pretend the stations don't exist and burrow themselves deeper into a more and more Balkanized niche echo chamber, never exploring anything outside of their comfort zone.

FMs I've listened to this week: WXRT/Chicago, KCSN/Northridge, KING-FM-HD2/Seattle, KTNN-FM/Tohatchi, K279BO/Palm Springs.

If you want to hear the same old thing over and over, by all means wallow in Spotify or whatever you loaded onto your iPod a decade ago. I do that sometimes, too. It's comforting.

However, there's a world of good and interesting music out there. You just have to make an effort beyond tapping the play button and letting a computer decide what you hear.

The AM/FM headset linked in your grandparent does not support streaming.

Of course there are some great stations to stream; there is infinite musical content online that I use to great advantage. But we're specifically talking about FM/AM broadcast and the chaff heartily outweighs the wheat in most locations.

I understand that, and all of the stations I listed are broadcast FM, so my point stands: There are plenty of great FM stations, if you bother to look for them instead of wallowing in your already-selected music.

Just because they also stream doesn't mean it's not useful to know about.

No, there are very few great radio stations, covering a small slice of the world's population. That there's a great station transmitting 3000 miles away doesn't help me.

The internet was a boon exactly because I was sick and tired of all the FM stations that I had available, with their narrow and small playlists, and it allowed me to discover whole new genres and authors (including by listening to online radio). In the mean time, FM just become even worse. The first half is essentially all I have available, do you care to choose a great one? https://radioonline.com.pt/

You shouldn't assume everyone has the same access to good things you did and must be lazy and narrow-minded.

College radio stations remain interesting.

E.g., if swing/big band is your thing and you live in the Bay area, https://www.kcea.org/ on 89.1 MHz is pretty awesome.

True. I sometimes stream university stations in Canada but there are no college/university stations that I can get on broadcast radio.

Sadly, with a coverage radius only slightly larger than the campus.

Yeah, not great for road trips...

On the other hand, you get a new one every 20 miles down the freeway.

What makes you believe that satellite radio would be better?

Satellite radio already exists, they can just compare.

It is interesting how this varies by country.

I am French and our FM radios are good in average. Some are excellent, some are poor. The distribution is skewed towards good.

I have the same impression when listening to German ones, though I listen only occasionally and just a few stations.

Then going further east, you have the Polish ones which sound unbereable to me, everyone is unnaturally shouting, or behaving in a very unnatural way (I belive this is copied from the US, despite French radios such as FUN betting precursors of modern FM there in the 90's). There are exceptions though, such as Tok FM.

Tok FM was the only station that was listened to in my household exactly because of those reasons.

Small, regional stations in Poland are much better in this regard than the big ones with national coverage.

Still, barely anybody invests in licensing the latest songs so there's a more or less stable list which is repeated over and over.

The parent commenter may have meant why not use a low-power FM transmitter for your own mobility needs (source to FM transmitter to any FM radio)? They are cheap and ubiquitous now.

The apple watch is a little closer.

How effectively can a watch + earbuds replace carrying a phone? Anyone do it regularly?

I did it when I used to work in the office, and it was pretty nice. I have the first generation Apple Watch, so the phone still had to be nearby, but I could keep my phone in my pocket, and it freed up a little space on my desk.

My wife uses the current Apple Watch with AirPods at work, and only uses her phone at home. She leaves her phone in her purse, and seems happy to not have to carry anything else around.

If you just need the basics - phone calls, simple messages you can do via voice, directions, streaming and local music/podcasts. It works well.

I have a watch with cell service and AirPods. I leave my phone at home when running and biking. Works fine for music and emergency comms, with negligible weight to bounce around. Also stops me leaving my phone behind in the gym.

Out of topic for sure, but I tried the same combination and my AirPods keep falling off while running. Do you have any solutions to this?

I did it last summer for running. I have an Apple Watch series 4. It's pretty restrictive -- you must use Apple Music, and you can only play Apple Music playlists -- i.e., you can't just search for music and play that. It was nice running without a phone, but I have a Flip Belt this year and it doesn't bother me.

Why is it a request or a requirement to not just have streaming Spotify or [insert music streaming service] over a cellular connection?

Satellite radio has awful audio quality for music. I am far from an audiophile, but even I can hear that Sirius/XM sounds like those MP3s I used to download over dialup to save time.

I want to be able to listen to songs without worrying about bandwidth, downloads, subscriptions, charge on source device etc.

-20 years in the future.

It's entirely feasible but what's the point. By the time you have designed an efficient network for distributing all kinds of audio from 1 (idealized server) to N earpods you've basically just reinvented the internet anyway. There are too many people without any internet connections (or food, let's be honest) to fuck around with a system like that ethically or with any financial responsibility.

TIL that the Walkman was sold as the Freestyle here in Sweden, which is why that word was adopted for any kind of portable music player.

It's one of those fun corners where Swedish contains an English word for something, which doesn't match the word actually used by people speaking English. :) This might be what linguists call a "false friend", but I'm not sure. I also love the German "beamer" (=video projector) in this category.

While English speakers might mean a BMW with beamer :-)

Not to mention the German Handy, i.e. mobile phone.

Japanese has lots of these. One of the most confusing is "consent", which means "electrical socket".

I found my Walkman, a WMF-100 from 1988 or '89, last year while going through a box of stuff I had saved:

https://i.imgur.com/d1RqfVT.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/11LWVnw.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/PARDWpn.jpg

It's in very used shape, the battery leaked and the face plate with the tuning frequency is loose. I remember buying it at Crazy Eddie's in NJ to replace the yellow sports walkman I managed to destroy.

I can't begin to describe how much I used to dread when the batteries would begin to get depleted which would slow down the motor turning the cassette and distort the sound being produced.

Boom boxes have made a comeback. Some phones are pretty loud. You can buy a lightweight sound amplifier to add to a phone. People use these hiking, running, biking, at picnics, etc.

I understand at a picnic... I don’t understand people by themselves wanting to project on to others their music choices after they’ve become adults. As a teenager I understand why we might have done that, but not grown adults.

I've come across lots of hikers and trail runners doing this, usually small groups of HS students. It's not really a big deal because they pass by in a matter of seconds, or you can let them pass you if they're going the same way. In some ways it's safer to use ambient audio on the trail rather than headphones.

> In some ways it's safer to use ambient audio on the trail rather than headphones.

It is also good for warning the bears that there is a group of people coming so the bear doesn’t get startled and attack.

The music helps dull the pain of the walking (Brings back fantastic memories of getting injured while walking a 61 mile training route on Dartmoor)

On the bus, in stores, at restaurants... so inconsiderate.

I only saw four features which I thought added value to a walkthing

1) dual headphone output. Sharing is cool!

2) a microphone. This changed journalism from niche device with dictation cassette to street journalist. Democratisation of news followed a trend down from a five person crew to two or one as VHS came in.

3) l and r separated volume. Only saw it once but for cheap stereo it meant you could do music minus one and dial down vocals on one channel

4) tape speed change. Autotune for free!

5) autoreverse

yea that was cool. drained your batteries if you fell asleep with the damn thing running but.

One totally genius design feature of the Walkman was the fact that it had two headphone jacks. Together with music ripping and mix tapes, this was the beginning of music sharing, and eventually the downfall of the monolithic music industries. Truly a disruptive innovation.

My dad was sharing music on 10 inch tape reels long before the walkman, and the walkman itself was far from the first cassette player.

True.. it was not the first. But it was I believe the first portable one that was capable of playing an entire cassette tape from beginning to end. It was the new generation rare earth magnets that enabled this.

If I recall correctly, when you used both headphone jacks, the volume would get weaker.

And Bluetooth doesn't support two listeners! :(

Android supports multiple output for A2DP devices

I think they must be overstating the thing about headphones being unprecedented. Episode 1 of the sitcom “Dobie Gillis”, from 1959, introduces Bob Denver’s character by showing him listening to a transistor radio using an earpiece

That’s an earpiece from a 1950s transistor radio. The sound quality is terrible and it only goes in one ear.

90s technology struggles (4 min comedy video) [NSFW] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730689

Frank Black's love song to the Ramones is as much a love song to the Walkman. ;-)

https://youtu.be/oGbbwBET-p4

https://archive.is/0xYH4

Still have my WM-2.

I don't like that website. Do they really need fixed bars on the top and bottom asking me to subscribe? Not to mention article is littered with ads and a half screen nag as soon as you start scrolling.

Interesting, this was not the case for me on mobile Firefox.

Desktop Chrome: https://i.imgur.com/fehpJVk.png

Makes me feel like I'm reading through a small window. That was after I closed the obnoxiously large 'subscribe' box.

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