Celebrate Anachronism

Sony stopped producing the Walkman. This Slate article outlining the history of the Walkman (some of the earlier stuff is really intriguing, like the fact that they used to have two headphone jacks) uses a picture of the model I have, which spent the last five years lonely and forgotten in my drawer for lonely and forgotten things (I've had one of those in every apartment I've ever lived in). I decided to take it out, really not expecting it to still work because the cassette decks on my stereo broke years ago - but it only took two batteries to find out that I was wrong. It still works perfectly. There is a much younger iPod in the very same drawer that broke only two years after I got it. There is a Minidisc player (I was very fond of) which has since stopped working. There's even an chunky Discman, but it starts skipping about ten minutes into every single CD. But the Walkman still works. Maybe I'm getting old, but I would trade in some of the features of the fancy new gadgets for some reliability and longevity (the tape, by the way, contains the concert that first introduced me to Kante and Blumfeld).