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.

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The original TPS-L2 Walkman went on sale 30 years ago today, July 1st 1979, in Japan. It played stereo and had dual mini headphone jacks for sharing audio with a friend. There was a mic, but it was not used for recording, but to output your voice to your buddy's headset so he could hear you over the music. The press received it in a lukewarm fashion, but the device took off thanks to celebrity product placement.

The 1981 WM-2 is the first attempt at making a Walkman so small, its only slightly bigger than the tape.

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The first Sony Sport walkman was quite waterproof, with jack plug and gaskets around the buttons and tape hold. From 1984. They offered special edition models for locations like Hawaii and Okinana Beach.

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The WM-F2 came out in 1982 and was the first Walkman to include both playback, recording and an FM tuner.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The WM-DD was the first personal model to move from a belt driven motor to a "disc drive" reducing wow and flutter and greatly improving the quality of sound reproduction. It also had a metal case.

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The WM-F107 was solar charged, but would not support playback as the power to run the tape was more demand than the now ancient back mounted panel could keep up with. It handled FM fine, however, off the stream of electrons. 1987.

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The WM-10 expanded on the tiny WM-2's small form factor, and is considered by the experts at Walkman Central to remain a fine example of reduction engineering. For example: the single AA battery was not actually powerful enough to turn the motors, so they used a step up converter to power the tape drive. 1983.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The 1983 Walkman Music Shuttle was a Walkman that docked into a car stereo. Wow that guy is super stoked to be listening to the same song he was just driving to!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.1985: The WM-W800 is a Walkman with TWO tape decks. One for playback, one for recording, which made dubbing tapes ridiculously easy. More photos at Walkman Central.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The WM-3000 from 1990 is one of the earliest My First Sony products designed for kids. They took a basic walkman, and made sure the edges weren't sharp, the batteries couldn't be easily popped out of the back and swallowed and the volume limiter ensured baby eardrums didn't pop under duress of mother goose tapes.

The WM-GX202 is one of the last tape playing Walkmen and guess what? They're still being sold in Japan in 2009! The product's focus is not on music, but on language learning tapes.

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

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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...

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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.

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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:

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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.

To the kid's credit, he was able to deduce that the tape had two sides (took him three days) and that you could switch between two kinds of tapes fairly easily. He was also given weird looks on the street and allowed to listen to music in class because of his teachers' nostalgia. Other choice quotes:

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.

I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, "Walkmans eat tapes". So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day.

Another useful feature is the power socket on the side, so that you can plug the Walkman into the wall when you're not on the move. But given the dreadful battery life, I guess this was an outright necessity rather than an extra function.

But in the end, which did he like better: his Walkman or his iPod? The iPod, of course, except for the fact that the Walkman had two headphone ports for easy music sharing. [BBC via Engadget]