From How the Cadillac Got Its Fins by Jack Mingo:

How the Walkman Caught the World's Ear

Thank God for the Walkman. Before it, the only portable "personal stereo" was the boom box, carried on the shoulder and usually played loudly. The Walkman made it so we didn't have to be subjected to other people's questionable taste in music. . . or their whining about ours.

Best of all, the Walkman's sound is quality stereo. Nowadays, that may not seem that big a deal, but not that long ago, portable tape recorders were clunky things that played distorted music through bad speakers. If you wanted to listen privately, you had to stick a little beige plug into one of your ears; it sounded like a telephone in a tin can.

The funny thing is that the Walkman was, to the team of Sony engineers who designed it, a major disappointment. They were aiming for something completely different. Headed by Mitsuro Ida, they had earlier achieved great success with a small portable tape recorder called the Pressman. It was wonderfully compact (5 1/4 by 3 1/2 by 1 1/8 inches) and included a built-in microphone and speaker. It became the standard tape recorder for journalists.

The Pressman was in mono only, and radio journalists began asking Sony for a stereo version in the same convenient size. Late in 1978, the engineers started shrinking and consolidating the components of a stereophonic tape recorder, trying to get them into the same chassis. They almost made it. They could fit in playback parts and two tiny speakers, but not the recording mechanism. Since the whole point was to come up with a recorder, the first attempt was a grave disappointment.

Still, it wasn't a bad first try. The quality of the sound was surprisingly good, considering its size, so Ida kept the prototype around the shop instead of dismantling it. Some of the engineers started playing cassettes on it while they worked on the next attempt. Their failure weighed heavily on project leader Ida's mind. After all, Sony prided itself on its innovations in tape recorder technology. The postwar company's second product-and first success-was an innovative tape recorder that impressed the recording world in 1950. (Sony's first product, released three years earlier, was an electric rice cooker that tended to give shocks and start fires.)

One day Masaru Ibuka wandered by. He did that a lot. He was an innovator who, with Aido Morita, founded the company and was responsible for much of its early success. But, as the years went by, he was seen as too quirky and creative to fit into the smooth day-to-day operations of the corporation that Sony had become. Morita took over operations and made Ibuka honorary chairman, a ceremonial role that gave him much respect, little authority, and lots of time to wander the halls of Sony.

Ibuka watched the Pressman engineers working on their design problem. He heard music coming from the unsuccessful prototype and asked, "Where did you get this great little tape player? It sounds very nice."

Since Ibuka spent a lot of his time roaming around, he knew pretty much what was going on all over the company. He suddenly remembered another project he had looked at - a set of lightweight portable headphones that were being developed by an engineer named Yoshiyuki Kamon on the other side of the building. "What if you got rid of the speakers and combined your stereo with his headphones?" Ibuka asked Ida. "The headphones would use less power and increase the quality of the sound. Who knows, maybe we can sell this thing even if you can't record on it. After all, it makes great music."

The engineers listened politely-while privately thinking that the old man had finally lost his bearings. Why make a tape recorder that can't record? Who would want to listen to music through headphones when they could have speakers? Why make something that would do less than everything that came before it? This is progress?

Ibuka, revered, honored, but with no authority to okay projects, went to his friend and partner Morita and showed him the gadget with headphones attached. Morita listened and was amazed at the quality of the stereo music. To the shock of the engineers, Morita told them to push forward with development.

The engineers were not the only ones surprised. The marketing department thought it was a terrible idea, too. They projected that the company would lose money on every unit sold. Told that the name being used in Japan, the Walkman, sounded "funny" to English ears, Sony first presented the Walkman as the Soundabout in the United States and as the Stowaway in England. The 1979 product rollout was a low budget, lukewarm publicity affair aimed at teens.

Nothing happened. Teens are conformists, by and large, and they held back, waiting to see what their peers would do. Boom boxes continued to sell; the Walkman languished on shelves. It looked like the engineers and marketers had been right in their skepticism.

Then the yuppies discovered it. Perfect for listening to Mozart while jogging and Boy George while commuting, small enough to fit into a briefcase or the pocket of a business suit, the Walkman became a sudden, raging success among the world's white-collar class.

The Walkman's sudden fad status surprised nearly everybody at Sony-especially the hapless production manager who had been told to prepare an initial run of sixty thousand units. The number had seemed grotesquely overoptimistic, so he ordered the parts for all sixty thousand but only assembled half that number. He figured that if the Walkman sold well, he'd have enough time to begin assembling the second batch. If it didn't, he'd be a hero for saving the company money. When Walkman sales exploded and Sony was suddenly caught with bushels of orders and no inventory, the manager nearly lost his job.