Sharpe's Opinion
Tuesday, 30th Jun, 2009
Giving up an iPod for a Walkman
13-year-old trades his iPod for an old Sony Walkman for a week.
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn’t is “shuffle”, where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly – effective, if a little laboured.
It’s amazing how much changes in a decade, isn’t it. Ten years ago, I had the marvellous honour of moving from my walkman to a MiniDisc player. Just imagine it – 70 minutes of music on a 3” square plastic disc!
Of course, now I’ll probably get 2.3 million comments about how I should have been around when we all carried pocket-sized vinyl record players with us, or something. Or had brass bands following us round everywhere who’d memorised all our favourite songs…
Comments
I read that article and what I was most stunned by was the fact there are 13 year olds who can actually string together a proper sentence.
Don’t give him too much credit, Matt – the BBC have sub-editors for that kind of thing! 
For what it’s worth, though, that kid actually co-edits a (pretty dull) tech news site called NetNewsDaily. Takes all sorts…
My own pot and kettle, I think. I re-read my comment above which has very poor sentence structure. Darn, I’ve done it again!
It should be fairly obvious that the ipod took off so quickly because it is so much more convenient.
I am sad enough to plough through all my music A-Z, then back through it, & not to even listen to a newly acquired record until its time comes up.
Were I to use a walkman, I’d have to lug around 10 tapes or CDs on a long journey. But now I can use an ipod.
I don’t, however, like the really minute ipods that don’t even have track listings on. If I’m listening to a relatively newly bought album*, I want to know which track is which so I can talk knowledgeably about them on future occasions.
*Yes, I do buy CDs. But I download if they are some ridiculous price & can’t be got cheap enough from the Amazon Marketplace. In general I take all this stuff very seriously. This is why I like blogging, because I can listen to tunes whilst doing it. I can’t really do that when reading books or print papers. & the reason I don’t watch TV, apart from the worthlessness of most programmes, is that nothing else can be done at the same time.
Gone on a bit there 
People believe the one-man-band was just a Mary Poppins-era money-making scheme.
It wasn’t, of course. It was the equivalent of the kids who walk down the street today with music emanating loudly from their mobile phones.
Mo
June 30, 2009 at 10:32 am