⏪ 30 years before Bitcoin

Satoshi stood on the shoulders of giants when they built Bitcoin.

Bitcoin could’ve only arrived in 2009 after the World Wide Web came along in 1989, which was only so accessible due to the advent of the microprocessor in the early 1970s. 

All three innovations are echoes of the telegraph.

I’m here to tell you that Sony’s Walkman may have been just as important.

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The release of the first Sony Walkman wasn’t exactly on this day. It was yesterday, in 1979, that Sony began selling the TPS-L2 in Japan — a blue, pocket-sized portable cassette player that became a worldwide cultural phenomenon in just two years.

Legend has it that Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka had tasked Sony’s tape recorder department with designing a device for listening to the opera on a long-haul flight.

A skunkworks team of crack engineers got to work. They pulled apart the Sony TCM-100B, or the Pressman, a portable cassette recorder that could be used with one hand released only a year earlier. 

The Pressman was already popular with journalists and businesspeople for taking voice memos and could playback recordings from an in-built speaker at 1.5x speed. 

Within four months and led by engineer Kozo Ohsone, Sony’s team replaced the Pressman’s speaker and record circuits with a stereo amp, producing a prototype in the same chassis. A portable, stereo cassette player, paired with a lightweight set of headphones. 

Despite internal protests from non-believers at Sony, it took only eight weeks for the first batch of 30,000 Walkmans to sell out in Japan, and by the end of 1980, two million units had been shipped worldwide.

While there had been earlier iterations of portable music players, Sony’s Walkman quickly became a must-have across all walks of life. The New Yorker, in September 1981, described seeing “seeing diplomats in Washington, stewardesses in Chicago, a cable-car conductor in San Francisco, and a toddler in Seattle, all of whom were wearing Walkman recorders or facsimiles thereof.” 

“To put things into context: the possibility of having a personal soundscape that one could walk around with did not exist in the 1970s,” writes Common Cog about the Walkman. “Building a device capable of this was not a hugely complicated technical challenge…but there was simply no proven market for it.”

Sound familiar? Before the Walkman, it was simply not feasible to be your own DJ, at least outside of the home and away from a stereo. The Walkman changed social behavior, with people isolating themselves with headphones in public spaces, on trains, buses and planes, for the first time ever. 

It’s an older slogan, but Bitcoin similarly made it possible to be your own bank, at least outside of hoarding cash under mattresses or in walls. Bitcoin has changed how people behave economically, having provided an alternative to a financial system that has never worked for everyone. 

Both the Walkman and Bitcoin faced pushback from society, with critics labeling it self-indulgent and anti-social, an accessory for the “me” generation. Bitcoin has otherwise only barely shaken its cultural connotations with criminals and fraudsters, however unwarranted.

Through a certain lens, the Walkman may have primed the culture for the arrival of Bitcoin, 30 years later, having warmed us up to the idea that we can be our own anything, no matter where we are.

But here’s how Bitcoin beat the Walkman: It took nine whole years for the Oxford English dictionary to include “Walkman” as a mainstream English term. Bitcoin made it in half that time, alongside “twerk” and “emoji.”

— David

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