I know I am not the best candidate to feel nostalgic about the Walkman since the device is older than me, but I still have had a good amount of exposure to it, and to be honest with you until recently I was still using it to transfer some of my dad’s old cassettes to digital format. Since tape decks are hard to come by nowadays and if you do find one the belts inside are pretty much loose and worn out so the sound distorts. Surprisingly the Walkman still has kept up its fidelity after all these years and is still the best way to play a cassette (if you can still find one).

What I found interesting about this article wasn’t the Walkman itself, but the general era of electronics. Again, I know some of you reading this probably have a much wider range of experience with this – yeah I know, you remember the days that everyone had to gather around the big box in the living room to listen to the radio since there was no TV or you can remember that the TV took 10 minutes to warm up before you could watch it in black and white – but I still have seen them, used them and know about them. In the past decade or so technology has advanced so radically and so fast that the upcoming generation won’t even know about the things that existed in my time and that’s not that much time. To list a few the film cameras, slides, slide projectors, Beta Max, VHS, cassettes, Atari, Commodore 64, B&W TVs, standard definition TVs, Gamma tubes, 286 and all the other types of computers and last but not least dot matrix printers.

The amazing thing is that the technology has advanced so fast and so dramatically that at 26 it has gotten me talking like my great uncle talking about his younger days, when he had to hike 10 miles, uphill, in the snow to listen to some guy sing if he wanted to listen to music. Not that I’m complaining or that I feel bad, I just think the newer generation needs to be educated on the older technologies just so they don’t take the new things for granted. We are all a little guilty in taking things for granted, so next time when your internet doesn’t work or god forbid gets a little slow or when your cell phone drops the call don’t yell at, and in the words Louis C.K. “give it a minute it’s going into SPACE”.

If you want to read Scott Campbell’s article go here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8117619.stm