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Part of my cd Walkman collection. Most work, a few don't.
That's a trip down memory lane for sure! Unfortunately, I'm a music freak, so all my previous walkmans, were broken over time. I had one of the sport cassette players and the sport cd player. Back in the early to mid nineties, my portable cd player (NOT a sony, iirc, panasonic had a better transport, but it's been decades so don't quote me) would only get one cd's worth of playing out of 4 AA batteries. So, I bought a fanny pack that was large enough to hold the cd player and 4 D cell batteries that I wired in series to be the proper voltage (?1.4v?) and I had a pair of Sennheiser headphones, over the ear style, but somewhat minimized and made water resistent, and would often go for long walks in the snow listening to 3 or 4 cd's. Musta looked pretty funny, but I didn't care.
At the same time, the first Sony mini disc player/recorders were being introduced, and I was fascinated with the whole concept of compressing the data down, They didn't call it MP3 though, iirc, but they did use the words Freunhoffer, I remember that from the literature that I devoured, never could afford one.
@Yodathedog , got any of the sony minidisc? were they 'proper' walkmans?
In 97 or early 98, a guy came into my shop in california, and showed me this tiny device he told me was 'the future' of music, it was called an mp3 player (I forget whos version it was) As he was describing what and how of it, i was reminded of mini discs. (of course, this was before the internet as we know it, there was no Google, just Yahoo and maybe Ask Jeeves, so knowledge wasn't as widely available, back then /alt/music/... was it. ) It only held a couple of cd's worth of songs (I think) and it was tiny, smaller then a pack of cigarettes.
Funny, i had an apple Newton back then, and I had the modem card for it, but I couldn't have imagined all these various threads converging into today's smart phone, although I wish I had... coulda made some cash.