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Jul 1, 2009 | 2
On this day three decades ago, Sony's original blue-and-silver Walkman went on sale in Japan, launching an era of personal, portable music and generations of oblivious subway riders and pedestrians.
The first Walkman, called the TPS-L2, cost 33,000 yen (roughly $150) in Japan and didn’t make it to the U.S. until 1980. In case you forgot, the original cassette-playing device had some quaint features, including a pair of headphone jacks that allowed two people to listen simultaneously and a "hotline" switch that activated a microphone to pipe in ambient sound instead of music.
For the price of a 1979 Walkman, you can get a Walkman Video MP3 Player today, with four gigabytes of memory that stores up to 40 hours of music and 10 hours of video, capabilities that were inconceivable during the disco era.
Jan 28, 2009
Seems that undeleted information stored on discarded computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices has a habit of re-surfacing and biting its previous owner in the backside, especially if that owner is the U.S. military. The U.S. Defense Department now has to figure out how a an MP3 player containing 60 Army files that included the names and details of American soldiers found its way to an Oklahoma pawn shop, New Zealand broadcaster TVNZ reported this week.
A 29-year-old native New Zealander bought the player for $18 and found that it contained lists of soldiers based in Afghanistan, those who have fought in Iraq, and cell phone numbers for soldiers based there and at other U.S. posts overseas, TVNZ reported. The station said that neither the U.S. Army nor the American embassy in New Zealand would comment on the situation.
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