A premature report in the newspaper today stating Sony's plan to stop production of their revolutionary Walkman cassette player in Japan, made me nostalgic about a similar device I had in my pre-teen years. Long before the days of portable multimedia devices, when the only portable device was a traditional radio (called 'transistor' in day-to-day language), having a Walkman was a cool thing to have. Who so ever knows about Sony and their history would surely agree that invention of Walkman was the best thing to happen to them and the history of personal entertainment and music industry. Introduced in 1979, it has till now sold more than 200 million units.
I remember that in late 80s, I was hooked onto Binaca Geet Mala - a weekly radio countdown show of top movie songs on Radio Ceylon. It was on my portable radio, that I used to listen to Ameen Sayani each week. Each Monday night, I would climb upstairs to my brother's room and would ask him to set the radio frequency to radio Ceylon. And then my brother bought a Walkman - not exactly the Sony one but a Philips one. A white bodied small little player, it was a huge thing to me. It was such a big craze for me to have that player tucked in my trousers and the headphones on my ear all the time. I used to listen to lots of songs and would love to show off to my friends.
Those were the days...
