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Passwor- is the only password manager certified in the Russian Federation's stack. Would you trade your motorcycle for a cassette player? No? But would a savvy Soviet teenager from the eighties? Without a doubt. In the eighties, a player was more than a gadget. It was a dream, an object of desire, a status symbol, a portal to another world. Today, we will talk about Walkman cassette players, how they appeared, and how they conquered the world. Well, it all started with the invention of the cassette. It was invented by Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, and Philips solemnly introduced it at an industrial exhibition in Berlin in 1963. After the huge reels of reel-to-reel tape recorders, this in itself was a revolution. Sony Corporation was one of the first to acquire a license from Philips for the breakthrough technology. As early as 1966, it released its first cassette device. Soon, one of Sony's dictaphones even made it into Earth's orbit. NASA astronauts took it with them aboard the Apollo 7 spacecraft to keep an audio diary and listen to music in space. It turned out to be an excellent PR move. In the sixties and seventies, the Japanese actively produced portable cassette equipment. But, strangely enough, not for music. They made professional equipment, dictaphones for businessmen, journalists, and translators. All of this was very useful for work, but too expensive and bulky to listen to favorite music on the way to work. Well, that's how the first Walkman appeared. According to legend, Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka took a stereo player with headphones on long flights to listen to his favorite operas. The heavy device annoyed him, and he asked his subordinates to make a compact player based on the portable journalist dictaphone Pressman. It's convenient when you have your own corporation, right? You're missing something. You call the office and say, "Can you invent it, please?" A Japanese boss's request is law for a Japanese subordinate. Four days later, the audio device development department prepared a prototype for Ibuka with good sound and headphones. The prototype worked for 3 to 8 hours on two AA batteries. To reduce the size of the case, the engineers removed the recording function. Despite the fact that Ibuka's batteries died on the plane, and he couldn't find replacements, he liked the sample so much that he suggested his partner and head of Sony, Akio Morita, launch the player into production. He convinced his partner simply by giving him the device and suggesting he try it himself. Morita didn't part with the player all weekend, and on Monday, he called an urgent meeting of his colleagues and announced that Sony was now making a player and that development needed to be accelerated to finish before the summer holidays, as the main audience for this device was schoolchildren and students. It's important to emphasize what a miracle it seemed at the time to be able to play music anywhere. Now we have a smartphone with us, which has any album, any movie, and indeed anything you want. But back then, you could only hear your favorite song either on the radio, on television, or at home on a record. To walk through the park, remember a track, and immediately play it. But that was science fiction. Humanity had not yet had such a relationship with music. Therefore, the board members initially didn't understand Morita, thinking, "What nonsense? Why listen to music on public transport or while jogging? Go home, sit comfortably in your armchair, and listen there, like all decent people." Morita even had to threaten to resign if his proposal was rejected. The history of technological progress and Walkman players as its symbol is a story of constant adaptation to new conditions. As soon as you invent something groundbreaking, competitors are breathing down your neck, and they don't wish you well at all. The sphere of digital security is structured similarly today. Any company whose employees use anything digital, from email to laptops, has to constantly adapt to new threats. If it was once enough to simply install antivirus software on a work computer, today that's no longer sufficient. More modern protection is needed not only for computers but also for other vulnerable points. This is precisely what Kaspersky Lab does. The company has a comprehensive solution that helps protect workplaces, corporate email, and employees' mobile devices. The solution is available for companies with up to 1,000 devices. Details in the description. And so, on July 1, 1979, the first portable audio player from Sony went on sale. It weighed 390g with batteries, had a blue metallic casing, and cost around $150. In today's money, that's about $500. It came with portable headphones weighing only 50g. No one had seen anything like that before either. Everyone was used to heavy constructions that covered half the head. The player had stereo sound. At the time, it was a breakthrough for small gadgets. Most questions from modern users are raised by the noticeable colored "Hotline" button on the player's casing. What did it do? It muted the music and activated the built-in microphone so that the external world could be heard through the headphones. The fact is that the very concept of listening to music alone in public seemed somewhat antisocial to polite Japanese people. You put on headphones and seem to isolate yourself from society in your little world. You sit there and ignore everyone. It's impolite. For the same reason, the first model had two headphone jacks to listen to the same music together. Both the button and the player, from the perspective of Sony engineers, were intended to show that this was not a gadget for loners, but for popular, fashionable, stylish youth who had many friends. Looking ahead, both functions were removed in subsequent models. No one used them. It turned out that isolating oneself from society was very pleasant. The player was called Walkman, by analogy with the Pressman dictaphones, in the sense that you could and should walk with it. For demonstration purposes, the presentation was held right in Tokyo's Meiji Park. All journalists were given players and invited to move around. A photo of a reporter in headphones on a skateboard subsequently went around the world. Morita's intuition proved prophetic, and the Walkman was an instant hit. Sony initially planned to sell 5,000 units per month. Instead, 30,000 units were sold in the first 3 months, and 140,000 in the first 7 months. Interestingly, the Walkman was not formally the first portable audio device in history. As early as 1972, Brazilian-German Andreas Pavel created a portable device for listening to music with headphones and called it Stereobelt because the device was attached to the belt with a strap. It caused nothing but misunderstanding and ridicule at the time. One can imagine Andreas's mood when he saw how the Sony Walkman was selling. He later sued for copyright for a long time and only reached a settlement in 2004. In 1980, the Japanese were not concerned with him. They were preparing for the American premiere of their player. The main dispute was about the name. In Japan, they were sure that Americans would not understand the word "Walkman." For America, the brand Soundabout was created, and for Great Britain, Stowaway. But then the customer decided everything. Tourists, flight attendants brought players with them, and word of mouth spread news about the amazing new gadget. And by the time of its release in the West, the term had become quite recognizable. In June 1980, the first Walkman went on sale in the USA. This release and all subsequent ones were accompanied by an aggressive advertising campaign. In the commercials, people danced in the streets. The world turned from black and white to color after pressing the Play button, and so on. The most famous advertisement featured a meditating monkey named Choromatsu. The wise macaque listens to classical music on the shore of a mountain lake. But the main reason for the Walkman's wild success was something else. In 1981, the MTV television channel began operating in the USA, and culture changed irrevocably. For about 20 years, music became the main element of identity. And any conversation in a teenage group would now begin with the obligatory, "What are you listening to?" Walkmans sold millions of units per year, with 60% going directly to export. The world quickly embraced the so-called Walkman effect, the essence of which was described by The Washington Post. It's like drugs. You turn on the player and disconnect from the rest of the world. Of course, there was a little public panic. How could there not be? Activists demanded that headphones be banned in schools, near roads, and during dangerous work. Nothing could be banned. Moreover, the player became a status symbol and a super-fashionable item. Many celebrities, from George Michael to Andy Warhol, were seen with Walkman players. Warhol said he was very pleased to listen to Vivaldi on Manhattan instead of car horns. The word "Walkman" even entered the Oxford Dictionary as a common noun, alongside "Xerox." Sony's competitors, such as Aiwa, Panasonic, and Toshiba, quickly joined the race and started making their own players. But Sony had already managed to get far ahead. A player is a technically very complex device. Besides electronics, there is a lot of miniature mechanics. And throughout the eighties, Sony engineers continued to shrink it. They seemed to be deliberately showing off, like, "Look what we can do." Each new Walkman model added or improved something: radio, metal casing, auto-reverse, rechargeable battery instead of disposable ones. In 1983, the Walkman WM10 was released. It was so small that it was physically smaller than a cassette. To insert a cassette, you had to slightly expand it. The printed circuit board of the electronic components had to be made flexible and rolled into a tube, otherwise, it wouldn't fit. In 1988, the WM505 appeared. It came with wireless headphones, 12 years before the invention of Bluetooth. In 1989, for the tenth anniversary, a limited edition of the flagship model WM701 with a silver-plated casing was released. Only 2,000 such players were made. American magazine Time wrote: "The eighties can be called the decade of the WM. In the first 10 years, Sony sold about 50 million players worldwide." From 1985 to 1990, the company's revenue almost doubled, reaching $19 billion. In the Soviet Union, Walkmans were unavailable. You could bring one from a trip abroad or buy it at a Beryozka store for special checks. We had a separate episode about Beryozka. Please watch it if you haven't seen it. In rubles, a 1986 Walkman WM101 cost about 250 rubles, which was two average salaries. Sometimes a new player was indeed exchanged for a used motorcycle. And the former motorcycle owner still felt very, very lucky. Owning a Walkman meant belonging to the world of elite "forts" (speculators), those who traveled abroad, or children of the nomenklatura. In 1994, for another anniversary, the fifteenth, a gilded version of the WM1 model was released in a print run of 500 units. Throughout the nineties, Walkmans remained incredibly popular, despite Sony actively mastering the new CD format. The brand eventually extended to CD and then to MP3 players. The total number of cassette Walkmans sold over time is estimated at 200 or even 220 million units. The Walkman was truly killed not by the compact disc, but by the iPod. There is a legend that the young inventor Steve Jobs received a Walkman as a gift from Morita himself during a business trip to Japan. He didn't listen to music and instead immediately disassembled the gift to understand the device's essence. Colleagues recalled that in his work, Jobs always oriented himself towards Sony, not towards direct competitors like IBM and Microsoft. And if you know the history of the Walkman, it becomes clear why. The first iPod was introduced in 2001 with the slogan "1,000 songs in your pocket." Most importantly, you didn't have to go anywhere for these thousand songs. They could all be downloaded from the internet without any problems. Legally or illegally? No cassette player could compete with that by definition. Cassette Walkmans continued to be produced, but it wasn't the same. In the USA, the last flagship model stopped selling in 2004, and in Japan, the last Walkman was discontinued in 2011. It is all the more surprising that today the fashion for cassette players is returning. Enthusiasts are looking for and restoring vintage players. Many musicians are releasing cassettes in addition to vinyl. Several new models of cassette players have even appeared from niche companies. A used Walkman in good condition on a marketplace can cost 10,000-15,000 rubles for a common model from the 2000s and hundreds of thousands of rubles for iconic varieties from the eighties. In some incredible way, the Walkman is in fashion again. Perhaps because people want to isolate themselves again. Only this time, from the endless notifications on their smartphones.