The first cassette player, and My first cassette player

This is the world's first laptop, designed by Bill Moggridge:

(the GRiD Compass, designed in 1979, though it didn't appear until 1982)

This is the world's first walkman, credited to engineer Nobutoshi Kihara under the direction of Sony boss Akio Morita:

(July 1979)

Apparently Sony just announced that they will stop producing the walkman.

There is an article here at Design Observer called "Keith Richards and His Amazing Portable Cassette Recorder":

“I’ve learned everything I know off of records,” says the guitarist-turned-historian of technological innovation.
What is important, Richards declares, is “being able to replay something immediately without all that terrible stricture of written music, the prison of those bars, those five lines. Before 1900, you’ve got Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, the cancan. With recording, it was emancipation for the people. “It surely can’t be any coincidence that jazz and the blues started to take over the world the minute recording started, within a few years, just like that.”

Never thought about it like that!

This is the model of portable casette player I had as a kid. Though I was more into the story telling than the Stones.

Hello, old friend.

oh, and this: