The Original Ipod
Recently the BBC had a very clever idea: give a 13-year-old kid the original Sony Walkman, let him test it out for a week, and get his impressions. It's fascinating to hear someone review the technology who's never used a cassette player, let alone a Walkman:
In some classes in school they let me listen to music and one teacher recognised it and got nostalgic.An old codger like me stays with the kid as long as he can, then bellows in frustration, "Hey, hey! This isn't Babbage's difference engine we're talking about! It's not THAT primitive!" But of course, it is. We've just forgotten.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 would be difficult to convey to a young person today the very odd -- even revolutionary -- feeling you had the first time you used a Walkman. You'd be walking down the street, the music blasting in your ears the way it would if your stereo at home was cranked up to 11, but no one else heard it. You were in a different space, effectively checked out of the world. William Gibson had that feeling too when, as a poverty-stricken young man in 1979, he scraped together $200 and bought an early Walkman. It was the experience of being transported by the machine that inspired him to coin the word "cyberspace" -- a place simultaneously vivid and unreal.
