The Walkman Archive Is Now Open

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 wor…