basically all cutting edge tech from my teen years:
When I was a little kid my dad’s old retired police cruiser still had an 8-track player in it. Y’all ain’t that old. I was there for that thing’s entire lifecycle, then portable mp3 players’ too. Streaming on mobile will probably last a while though.
Ain’t no way that’s a Discman. I have a Sony one from the 90s on my desk, for one. Two, I thought Sony had the trademark on Discman? And three, that’s Panasonic and doesn’t have Discman anywhere on it.
So unless Discman wasn’t trademarked and became synonymous with CD players, I refuse to accept that’s a discman!
I was gonna say the same thing, but I’m glad you did. Makes me feel old anyway.
It’s Sony, y’all. If there’s infringement to be imposed upon you know they’ll be right there swingin’ their Sony balogna.
Yet Wikipedia says Sony launched it in 1984 but changed the name to Walkman at some point
Discman was a Sony trademarked name only. That in the museum was a portable MP3 compact disc player with remote.
Yeah this gives the vibe of some poorly-researched hipster pop up “museum”
Perhaps a problem in museum, but at least where I live any highly portable CD player like this gets called “discman” same as with portable cassette players being called “walkman”.
Yeah what is that called when a product name becomes a common noun? Nintendo fought this so that “Nintendo” didn’t become synonymous with “videogame console.”
Trademark erosion?
I had a diskman when they were dying to pure MP3 players.
It was an ATRAK3 plus (a proprietary compression format) and CD player combo that came with software to burn whole libraries on standard CDs, complete with folders and everything.
It was cool as hell, a built-in an/fm tuner, and I used it for work for years along with a single rewritable cd. I had different folders for different languages and genres and shit.
You can buy them on eBay now for like $30, which ironically is more than I paid for it in 2002-4 or whatever it was, however the software to convert to the ATRAK3 plus format was super super hard to find even in the early naughties, unless you have the installer disc.
They should have put one of those into the museum. Would have been way cooler and more informative and shit
You confirmed my suspicions. I immediately looked at the tag and knew it probably wasn’t a Discman because there ain’t no way Sony wouldn’t have trademarked that name.
And it’s not even the first of its type. I had a 1st gen Phillips Expanium that I got back in 2000.
A pretty shitty museum really. Discman was only made by Sony.
I was gonna say, this museum had one job and they failed it
And why would you want one from 2002 instead of more of an OG like the Sony d-777 from around 1994.
the one pictured could play mp3 cds, you could actually walk with it. i want the OG where even thinking of a bump would make it skip.
It’s not even the oldest one. I had to wait like three Christmases until I could play mp3s on a disk without converting them first.
I had this exact model ! Burned a CD with all the Linkin Park, Sum 41, Blink 182, Rage against the machine, System of a Down, Red hot chili peppers, and more !
Those were simpler times…
You have an exquisite taste in music.
Papercuts is a jam
It’s still probably my favourite song of all time lol
All at 128kbps!
WTF is this nonsense, Discman was a specific Sony product ala Walkman.
Yeah, that’s a low blow. Not a Walkman, not just a portable Cd player, a bloody mp3 cd with a remote on the headphones from 2002. Who are you calling old, eh? Kids these days have no respect
I’ve seen a 3DS in the Technical Museum in Vienna.
Now that’s some nonsense, my mate’s kid still uses his, and he’s like 10
Not saying it necessarily belongs there, just that I saw it there.
Then again it was in a display about the evolution of consumer tech, and there were some newer smartphones there too, so I guess it did fit well into that.
I recently found my first mobile phone model in a museum. I know the feeling.
i found one in the basement. 15% battery life left.
I used to sell that model when it was the new hotness.
I had a Nokia 5110 too.
Wait until you see the home computer you grew up with, along with a joystick and selection of game tapes/discs including some of your favourites, in a glass case in a museum of technology; then you are free to crumble to dust.
God. Had A and B and the VIC-20 before A.
You’ve never been older in your life than you are now
It says MP3 on it. I remember when I was a kid, I wanted a mp3-player because it was the hot shit. So I bought a Panasonic discman that said “MP3” on it. That’s when I learned what “mp3-disks” are and how to quickly navigate through 400 songs using one button
Walking down the street, cradling the thing like a baby because the slightest bump would cause it to skip, those were the days xD
In 2002 they would all have anti-skip, even the cheap knock offs. The skipping was just in the early 90s.
Anti skip was awesome. I remember showing my friend’s dad and tapping it and stuff and it keep playing and his eyes went wide. Then he bought a minidisc player and blew MY mind.
Anti skip wasn’t completely anti skip if it took a massive jolt but for sure it was like magic compares to the old ones which needed to be preferably flat on a table xD
One massive jolt was okay, but sustained vibration was not. Anti-skip worked by caching a few seconds in the future and playing that when the laser lost focus. More than a couple seconds of no laser contact and the cache runs out.
I mean I was doing a paper round around 2000 and the one I owned certainly didn’t have anti-skip to begin with and even when they did have anti-skip that doesn’t mean that it never skipped as later ones I had with it only had “x seconds of anti skip” so if it receives a big jolt that shit was still skipping
And the CDs needed to be handled with kid gloves
I had one, and it was great for listening to my CDs when I was laying in bed, but if I had to actually walk anywhere I took my walkman and a bookbag full of tapes (half of which were books on tape and not actual music lol). Dealing with the skipping was just too damn irritating. Walkman was the clear winner for my use case
