I remember my first Walkman fondly. I was enthralled by the very notion: portable music. I had no idea at the time, but the Sony Walkman was only the beginning. It would, single-handedly, come to revolutionize the way people listened to music. Sony revolutionized the world of personal audio with the introduction of the Walkman portable audio cassette player, initially called the “Soundabout.” Though compact disc technology emerged the following year, Sony went on to sell over 100 million Walkman-like audio players—and that was in addition to innumerable knock-offs by other manufacturers, even before personal audio players evolved to play digital mediums such as compact discs (1988) and minidiscs (1992).

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