The Walkman Archive Is Now Open

Introducing a searchable archive of Sony portable audio history with more than 1,000 entries across 10 languages.

On July 1, 1979, Sony released the first Walkman in Japan. Over time, the portable cassette player became Sony’s language for personal audio, and the Walkman name moved from cassette to CD, MiniDisc, and eventually from physical media to digital files.

For this year’s Walkman anniversary, I wanted to do something more permanent than a post.

Today, I’m officially opening ObsoleteSony.com: a searchable, multilingual archive of Sony personal audio history, built around Walkman and the many forms that name eventually took.

You can visit it now, search for a model, browse by year, explore cassette Walkman, CD Walkman, MD Walkman, and Network Walkman, or spend some time moving through Sony’s portable audio history by format, feature, year, and memory.

The archive currently includes 1,066 Sony portable-audio model entries: 441 cassette Walkman models, 171 Discman / CD Walkman models, 106 MiniDisc / MD Walkman models, and 348 Network Walkman models.

It also includes model pages, specs, images, year guides, timelines, search, collections, rankings, article pages, spotlight pages, book pages, and public versions in 10 languages: English, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Korean, Russian, and Simplified Chinese.

One of the most important parts of the site is the filtering system. This is not just a search box or a long list of model names. The archive can be browsed by decade, year, series, sub-brand, category, format, features, battery type, storage capacity, and Japan-only releases, depending on the product family. That means you can narrow the Walkman archive to a specific era, find cassette models with Auto-reverse, Dolby, Mega Bass, or remote-control support, look through MiniDisc recorders with optical input, browse Discman models by CD format, or move through Network Walkman players by storage capacity, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Hi-Res, Android, USB-C, microSD, and other digital-era features. The filters are there because the archive is meant to work as a research tool, not only as a visual gallery.

You can use the archive in different ways. If you know the model number, you can search for it directly. If you only remember the year, you can browse by year. If you remember a feature, you can try searching for Mega Bass, Auto-reverse, Dolby, radio, remote control, G-Protection, MiniDisc, ATRAC, Bluetooth, or storage capacity. If you want a more guided way in, you can start with the timeline, collections, or rankings.

The cassette Walkman archive is the center of the site. It currently contains 441 model entries, covering the original cassette era from 1979 through the final years of Sony’s cassette line.

The site is not only a cassette archive. Cassette Walkman is where the story begins, but the full Walkman story runs through CD, MiniDisc, flash memory, hard drives, ATRAC, software ecosystems, and the complicated transition into digital audio.

The archive now spans around 12,000 public pages across 10 languages, with more than 1,000 Sony portable-audio model entries at launch. I am not aware of another Sony portable audio archive built at this scale, and I do not think there will be many attempts to make one this large.

This was created in part thanks to the support of paid subscribers, who have helped make it possible to spend the time required to research, organize, write, translate, and build something this extensive. ObsoleteSony.com is not only a launch-day project. It is a long-term archive that will keep growing.

The Walkman and Sony personal audio sections are the beginning. With continued support, I want to keep expanding the archive into more Sony categories over time, so more of the company’s design, product, and technology history has somewhere permanent to live.

On July 1, 1979, Sony released the first Walkman. 47 years later, the Walkman Archive by Obsolete Sony is open.