Still, should you wish to take the €220 plunge, one of these handmade cassette tape lamps can be yours. There's no guarantee of the musical selections you'll be offered, so don't come crying to us if you score some Brazilian Jonas Brothers release instead of the still-spectacular TNMT soundtrack. [ooomydesign via inhabitat via bbGadgets via DVICE]

The retro format is pricier at $30 compared to the digital or CD formats, and not too many people still own 8-track decks (well, except for me), but it's definitely a collector's item. You can pre-order it here. [CNET]

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

1. In the Walkman's first 10 years, how many different designs did Sony release?
A) 25
B) 70
C) 130
D) 170

2. What was the full product name of the first Walkman?
A) Super Karate Monkey Machine
B) WM-1
C) TPS-L2
D) Excalibur

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.3. What is the official, Sony-approved plural form of Walkman?
A) Walkmans
B) Walkmen
C) Walkmanidae
D) Walkman personal stereos

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.4. What is another name that the Walkman was to have gone by?
A) Soundabout
B) Freestyle
C) Stowaway
D) Super Karate Monkey Machine

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.5. What was the original desired name for the Walkman?
A) Stereo Buddy
B) Music Boy
C) Stereo Walky
D) Singman

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.6. What was the inspiration for the Walkman?
A) Sony founder Masaru Ibuka wanted to listen to opera tapes during his long trans-Atlantic flights
B) Sony president Akio Morita wanted to listen to music while he played tennis
C) In 1978, Sony's cassette division had lost its radio-cassette business to the radio division, and needed to impress their bosses with something new
D) All of the above

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.7. How many Walkman units sold in the first 10 years?
A) 1 million
B) 10 million
C) 50 million
D) 100 million

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.8. And how many competing Walkman clones sold?
A) 10 million
B) 50 million
C) 100 million
D) 150 million

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.9. Complete this sentence from a 1981 UK Daily Mirror article: "The Walkman has become the _________ of electronics."
A) Hairpiece
B) Skateboard
C) Lucky Strike
D) Hula Hoop

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.10. Which all-time great wrestler/movie star does the figure in the Walkman 10th-anniversary monument (at left) resemble?
A) "Macho Man" Randy Savage
B) Andre the Giant
C) Jesse "The Body" Ventura
D) Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson

1. (D) 170 different models, so basically 17 per year on average, enough to suit every man woman and child. [Source; Image Source]

2. (C) TPS-L2 - We're not entirely sure what happened to TPS-L1, but they quickly switched to the WM naming system. [Source]

3. (D) "Walkman personal stereos," which is totally unfair for journalists with tight word counts. "Walkmen" is a band, however, if you like bands named after your personal electronics. [Source]

4. (A) in the US (B) in Sweden (C) in the UK, but alas never (D) [Source]

5. (C) "Stereo Walky" – but, fortunately, Walky was already trademarked by Toshiba [Source]

6. (D) All of the above, and probably a handful of other apocryphal tales, too. [Source, Source; Image Source]

7. (C) 50 million [Source]

8. (D) 150 million, proving you can't patent a general concept, no matter how slick. [Source; Image Source]

9. (B) Skateboard [Source]

10. (B) Andre the Giant—seriously, doesn't he? [Source]

ANSWER KEY [Image Source]

Special serious thanks to Don the Intern for kicking ass all over the research end of our little Walkman 30th-anniversary party. Don't forget to check out our gallery of the craziest Walkman models, and of course, those brilliant Walkman ads from back in the 1980s. Hat tips to Pocket Calculator's Walkman Museum and to Tim and Nick Jarman's Walkman Central.

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):
The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

And then there's the dancer who'd prefer a slenderer music player:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

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...

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

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.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

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:

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

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.

For full resolution, click here.

It wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that mass-produced recordings were available to the average person—the concept of buying music is amazingly new. (Or to some, ooooooold.) Just a century ago, the first records began to do for music what the Gutenberg press did for words. Before them, music was handed crudely from person to person; after, it could reach millions, untouched and unspoiled.

If we couldn't record music, the Beatles would have never left Liverpool. By the same token the Jonas Brothers would have never left Georgia or Disney World or the Old Testament or wherever the hell they came from. Talk about progress! There may be no accounting for taste, but you can thank these reproducible formats for the very existence of the notion of pop music.

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

For those of you who know me, it shouldn't come as a surprise to know the very first CD I bought was the soundtrack to Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast. I was about 10 years old when I purchased the CD, but before that, I recorded my own cassette of it by holding an old boombox, with a double-tapedeck, up to the speakers through every single song of the movie.

I don't remember the gadgets I used to play them on, but from VHS to cassette to CD to digital download, I still listen to "Belle" at least once a week. It's true that living in my little magical bubble might make me a little detached from the real world, but you have to admit that this sparkly, yellow ball gown is so much more flattering on me than your wizard capes and crumpled up binder paper. Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!

For Gizmodo's week-long Listening Test (a tribute to all things audio), each writer will be sharing his/her first album. In other words, there will be many more to come.

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

The MV-CM001U can store MP3 and WMA files in 32/64/128/192/320kbps sizes, it features a 1.5W speaker and it has a surprisingly attractive wooden design. The device is only compatible with Windows XP or Vista, which is unfortunate because most of the people who would need it are probably still running Windows 98 or lower. [Novac via Crunchgear via Boing Boing Gadgets]

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

For me it was Richard Marx's Repeat Offender on cassette, which I ordered from one of those music catalog deals. It was one of the few cassettes I actually bought, since even back then, I used to pirate music by taping songs off the radio. I'm sure that tape is long gone, but the memories—oh the memories—will remain forever.

I think maybe half the tracks on there were good, with the other half being serviceable. Which is why being able to buy individual tracks now would have blown me away back in the '80s.

For Gizmodo's week-long Listening Test (a tribute to all things audio), each writer will be sharing his/her first album. In other words, there will be many more to come.

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

The Urban DJ portable cross fader has been ultimate retro hipster designed into a cassette shape. It has three inputs up top, two for connecting to anything from an iPhone to a cellphone (with the appropriate jack) and one for connecting into... well, I'm not sure what that middle one is for. The bottom has a separate input for connecting into a speaker set or headphones.

Move the slider to mix and crossfade between your two chosen music players. Alas, because all I had on me at the time was one measly iPod, the man sneered and approached the person standing next to me and that guy went on to become one of the most famous DJs in the world. True story.

Available for roughly $48. From Japan. [Gizmodo JP]

In fact, they are taking the cassette concept to such extremes as to render the digital benefits nearly pointless. The disks would come in 45/60/90 minute capacities (like actual retro cassettes) and require the user to manually rotate the spools with a finger or pencil to select songs. Rotating the second spool charges the kinetic battery.

It's a clever idea, but they lost me with the minuscule memory size and strict manual controls. At any rate, the NVDRS is unlikely to emerge from the drawing board anytime soon. [Yanko]

If you're longing for the days of mixtapes burned dubbed to a gaudy looking Memorex cassette, this is for you. The USB port allows you to transfer files to the PlusDeck to be put on tape, so you can play them back in your circa-1988 Walkman.

But the PlusDeck Ex does have a few worthwhile features, such as recording FM radio to a digital file, phono jacks for playing and ripping vinyl, 7.1 surround sound support and a cellphone In, which is presumably for recording voicemail and/or conversations. It also has RCA in/out, 3.5mm in, and a clock/timer that lets you schedule recordings.

The only problem is the thing runs about $300, which is about $250 more than I'm willing to pay, personally. [Think Geek via Uncrate via Wired]

The JVC player was probably only ever intended to service old, supplementary collections of tapes, but my romantic side hopes that at least one person will see this news and think "Aww, shucks, I guess it's finally.time to get one of those Dee-Vee-Dee players." As a comfort to those people, JVC (like others) will continue to offer a few combination players, and at least plans on selling its standalone VCRs until inventory runs out. [TradingMarkets via BBG]

In your heyday, people rocked out to your not-so-dulcet tones, unwitting grunge parents produced little grunge babies to the soundtrack of your sweet hisses, and relationships and restraining orders alike were borne of compilations carefully mixed onto your glossy insides. Now you're silenced, screwed into the shape of a cabinet and put up for sale on the same "Internet" that did such horrible things to your children. Such is the way of the world, Tape. And let's be honest — as much as you don't want to hear it, this is the coolest you've looked in years. [CreativeBarn]

Classic Commercials: Panasonic [TecheBlog]

OK, commenters, your turn: how would you label a cassette featuring your intrepid Giz editors? – Charlie White

Cassette Generator [SaysIt, via Boing Boing]