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13-Year-Old Kid Looks Back on 30 Years of Walkman

by Lee Bains on June 29, 2009 at 10:15 AM

In a sure attempt to make us all feel prematurely old, BBC Magazine has announced that today is the 30th anniversary of the Sony Walkman. If that fact alone doesn't have you clamoring for the prune juice, freelance BBC writer and Scottish 13-year-old Scott Campbell's retro-review of the classic gadget surely will.

BBC Magazine asked the Aberdeenshire student to carry the "cumbersome" gadget through a few days at school, where it was immediately met with sideways glances. Apparently, it took the youngster a few days to discover that a cassette tape had another side, and many more to get accustomed to the Walkman's relatively short battery life (three hours, or so).

Although we listened to our Walkmen much more intuitively than has young Campbell (granted, ours weren't of the first generation), we did run into one similar misperception in our youths. "I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer," he writes, "but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette." Don't feel too bad, Scotty. We remember popping in our favorite Black Sabbath tapes, switching on the 'Metal' function, and feeling sure that 'War Pigs' sounded just that much heavier. [From: BBC, via Engadget]

Tags: cassette, nostalgia, retro, sony, walkman

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