Take the Walkman 30th Birthday Quiz
Posted by The Right Guy in Technology on July 3rd, 2009
How much do you know about the most celebrated personal stereo of all time, one that is today turning the big Three Oh? A lot? OK, hell, let’s see what you got:
Notable and Crazy Sony Cassette Walkman Editions
Posted by The Right Guy in Technology on July 3rd, 2009
Sony’s cassette tape Walkman came to life in many shapes and forms through the years. Here are a few of the great, the important and sometimes plain weird Walkman models.
The original TPS-L2 Walkman went on sale 30 years ago today, July 1st 1979, in Japan. It played stereo and had dual mini headphone jacks for sharing audio with a friend. There was a mic, but it was not used for recording, but to output your voice to your buddy’s headset so he could hear you over the music. The press received it in a lukewarm fashion, but the device took off thanks to celebrity product placement. Read the rest of this entry »
Giz Explains: How to Choose the Right Graphics Card
Posted by The Right Guy in Technology on July 3rd, 2009
There are plenty of great graphics cards out there, no matter what you’re looking for. Thing is, the odds are seemingly stacked against you ever finding the right one. It doesn’t have to be that hard.
Whether you’re buying a new computer, building your own or upgrading an old one, the process of choosing a new graphics card can be daunting. Integrated graphics solutions—the kind that come standard with many PCs—have trouble playing games from three years ago, let alone today, and will put you at a disadvantage when future technologies like GPGPU computing, which essentially uses your graphics card as an additional processor, finally take hold. On top of all this, we’re in the middle of a price dip—it’s objectively a great time to buy. (Assuming you’re settled on a desktop. Ahem.) The point is, you’ll want to make the right choice. But how? Read the rest of this entry »
Great Sony Walkman TV and Print Ads of the 1980s
Posted by The Right Guy in Technology on July 3rd, 2009
To commemorate the Sony Walkman’s 30th birthday, here are the trippy ads Sony used to promote it in the ’80s. Noble monkeys, off-key kids and sweet-toothed senseis—where’s that f’d up sense of humor now, Sony?
Back in 1983, Sony declared the WM-10 Super Walkman the “world’s smallest cassette player,” and promoted it with ads that appealed to the dudes and to the ladies. There’s the fantasy hardware building demonstration, 1 minute into the following ad compilation (here if you don’t want to wade through Seth Green’s Matchbox spot and the rockin’ Simon hair-band ad):
And then there’s the dancer who’d prefer a slenderer music player:
OK, maybe that second one appealed to anybody with a leotard fixation (which, in 1983, was pretty much everybody).
Most people in their 30s will hate me for bringing this one up: The 1986 My First Sony campaign was responsible for sticking the following song inside the heads of a generation of people who are just now able to forget it. Click at your own peril…
Here’s one of the last cassette Walkman commercials, from 1990 or thereabouts, where a father grills his ridiculously dumb daughter on the pictures that appear on TV. She gets everything wrong—everything—but he let’s her mistaken sighting of a Walkman slide, because Walkmen (Walkmans?) are so cool.
And about that noble monkey, his name was Choromatsu, and he died at the extremely ripe age of 29 back in 2007. Here’s his 1988 spot, in which he grips a (Japan-only?) WM-501 and contemplates nature:
Before the zany TV commercials there were the fat-bucking-insane print ads. For instance, the small sampling below contains:
• A slick-looking posse of urbanites with nice shoes and likely heroin addictions
• A sensei sucking a lollipop while sitting next to a nipply lass 2X his height
• A lady perilously guiding a ten-speed at velocity while holding a Walkman
Special shoutout to Don the Intern for those mad researching skills. Hat tips to Pocket Calculator’s Walkman Museum, to Tim and Nick Jarman’s Walkman Central and to Bing’s image search tool. Try it out—it’s really quite different than Google’s.