Kids React to Walkman

Little River Band cassette not included.

Technology moves so damned fast that by the time you've saved enough money to buy that cool electronic trinket you saw on the shelf at Woolworth's, it's probably become obsolete and been replaced by something newer and better. Well, being replaced by something newer and better seems to have become Sony's corporate-mantra lately. The Japanese tech giant once held the enviable position of being the inventor of the Walkman, the first truly portable consumer stereo cassette player, but ended up losing it's winning grip on mobile music in the 2000s to Apple's juggernaut iPod. Oh they tried extending the brand to the Discman and the MiniDisc Walkman, and Sony enjoyed a brief bit of success with those formats, however with the mass-consumer drive towards digital music during the 21st century, physical storage formats like the Compact Cassette were clearly on their way out and the digital mp3 format was set to preside over their respective funerals. To an old fart like me, it doesn't seem that long ago that I was making kickin' mix tapes on my dual-deck to give to my sweetheart, but to any kid born in the last decade or so, it may as well have been a century. Check out this video of some little peeps pondering a portable cassette player and enjoy their frustrated and embarrassed reactions whilst we sit back and chuckle. Of course I make sure my kids are well-versed in ancient technologies like Atari, VHS and toaster ovens so that this never happens to them. They may grow up to be friendless and weird, but dammit, at least they'll know how to properly clean an LP.



BONUS VIDEO: SOME AWESOME OLD AD FOR A STEREO STORE IN TULSA

RIP MiniDisc

An early 90s example of technological failure.

Sony has long been a company known for its high-technology and sexy, high-priced products and for the most part, they've been extremely successful at hawking their wares to the American public. However, when it comes to promoting technology industry standards or introducing new media formats, they've always had a pretty weak record. Rarely has Sony seen any of their top-tier technologies take over the world (I still can't believe Blu-Ray beat out HD-DVD) and if you don't recall any other fails than BetaMax (1975), let me refresh your memory: DAT (1987), MemoryStick (1998) and UMD (2005) are just a few of Sony's more well-known media formats which failed to take hold with the public. Now Sony has recently announced that as of 2013, they will finally cease production of their MiniDisc (MD) format which was introduced as the successor to analog audio cassettes some 20 years ago. "They still make those?" you shockingly ask. Yes indeedy-doddily-dew. Apparently, the customers in Sony's homebase market, Japan, took more of a liking to the MD format than anyone over on this side of the globe ever did and have tenaciously supported the mostly-ignored format for the last two decades. Sony stopped producing their portable MD players in 2011 but continued to sell and support MD home stereo systems to the remaining hold-outs and aficionados, squeezing out the last few drops of profit from that revenue stream. Now it appears that even those stalwart retro-techies who didn't move on to the iPod ten years ago will be forced to look elsewhere to store their digital data and music files. These folks won't be completely out of luck, however, as Onkyo and a few other electronics manufacturers have stated that they will continue to produce MD equipment for what is left of this increasingly anemic niche market. However without any further support from the original creators of the format, who knows how long that will last? So, for all intents and purposes, the MD is finally dead. RIP you expensive bitch.

BONUS VIDEO: WATCH JAMIROQUAI PIMP THE MINIDISC BACK THE 1900s.