Hitting the Rewind Button on the Walkman

TOKYO -- Thirty years ago Sony launched the Walkman, the portable cassette player that revolutionized the way people around the world listened to music but has since been overtaken by an icon of the digital age: the iPod.

Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka came up with the idea for the gadget on one of his overseas trips, during which he used to listen to music on tape recorders that were too heavy to be considered truly portable. The Walkman's success helped transform the Japanese company into a global electronics powerhouse.

But after its launch on July 1, 1979, the Walkman faced poor initial reaction. Many retailers thought that a cassette player without a recording mechanism had little chance of success. Yet total sales of the Walkman have reached 385 million around the world, including newer digital models that use flash memory.

Sony says it chose the name Walkman partly because of the popularity of Superman at the time and the fact it was based on the audio recorder called the Pressman. Sony initially planned to call the machine Soundabout in the United States and Stowaway in Britain but changed its mind after hearing that children in Europe were already asking their parents for a Walkman.

For people who have grown up with iPods, Sony's music player can leave something to be desired. They include 13-year-old Scott Campbell, who was asked by the BBC to swap his Apple gadget for a vintage Walkman for a week. His friends, he said, "couldn't imagine their parents using this monstrous box."

It also took him three days "to figure out that there was another side to the tape."

"I mistook the 'metal/normal' switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette," he said.

Sony has tried to sell new versions of the Walkman in recent years, including one that looked like a jelly bean, with some success. It sold 7 million Walkmans in the year to March, up from 5.8 million the previous business year, a company spokeswoman said.

But it has failed to pose a serious challenge to Apple, which sold 100 million iPods in less than six years after the product's launch in 2001, making it the fastest-selling music player in history. Sales have since topped 200 million.

Sony announced in May its first annual loss in 14 years and warned it would stay in the red this year.

Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony USA, has vowed to meld the company's strength in electronics with its games and movies. He is also slashing 16,000 jobs and axing about 10 percent of Sony's manufacturing plants.