13-year-old trades iPod for Walkman, reports on mysterious ancient artifact
By Joshua Topolsky 
posted June 29th 2009 9:24AM
posted June 29th 2009 9:24AM
- When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.
- It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
- I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.
- When playing, it is clearly evident that the music sounds significantly different than when played on an MP3 player, mainly because of the hissy backtrack and odd warbly noises on the Walkman.
[Via Richard Lai]
I was lucky enough to be part of a gifted education program from the age of 11 on. By 13, most of the people in my class could write like that if they wished to.
Prove it's a fake story. Besides I remember when some of the cheaper personal stereo's never even had a rewind button.
@Adrian:
I remember that, too. It was, oh, let me think... about 2000? You could still get a perambulate-hominid from Walmart at least that late, with the world's cheapest earphones and FF, play, but no rewind. But the great thing (i.e. the only reason anyone ever bought one) was it only cost $5; I ran through a couple of those instead of splurging on the usual CD player, because I was saving up for an MP3 player (an IJ-100; they were really pretty awesome back then, first MP3 player to have an FM tuner).
Intelligent? I thought he was a dumbass for taking that long to figure out a Walkman.
i lol'd.. i still have a late 90's walkman with a radio in it, cost a fair bit back in the day
Maybe the kid is a gifted writer and that's why he was chosen for this piece?
Even if it's fake, his mom's cute.
I think that adds to the possibility of the article being fake. What's the probability of that kid speaking so eloquently AND an attractive older British woman? Article is factual, but most likely written by someone else and his mother was probably a tourist visiting England.
They probably wrote that to make us wankers think that even british 13yr olds are smarter than the average person anywhere else. Plus its not like every one of them lives under a false sense of security even with cameras pointed everywhere.
Either way it was still pretty funny, though I pictured a middle aged person. But I guess the ipod generation hasn't gotten that old yet. I'm 26 and still remember my walkmen, then cd player. carrying around all those discs, tapes got old.
Where would I purchase one of these fine Walkman's pictured above?
My Lord!
I cannot believe that kids that young never knew what tapes were.
I forget that they've become obsolete now...
I still have two old Walkman's sitting on a bookshelf unused. They are not the older bigger bulky ones and are in good working orer
That 13 yr old kid is a pretty good writer :)
Wow I remember when I was young and stupid, my first tape was Bone Thugs and Harmony, yeah them, didn't you hear what I said? I was yougn and STUPID. I'm 21 now and this makes me feel old :( wtf?
I'd kill somebody for a walkman :o
I like the fact that he plugged iPod earbuds into it :D The "not knowing how a tape's A/B sides work" concept is entirely realistic, I'm 25 and never owned a record player...so if you put me in front of one now and ask me to play a record, it would take some fumbling with it to get it right.
Man, I had to say this...
AUTOREVERSE!
lol, I'll admit that the word use is rather articulate, but would you give your article to a 13 y/o that was a GOOBER, or someone who could actually WRITE? this is the british school system and chances are the kid is choosing to become a writer/journalist. I had a knock off walkman that had a built-in tetris game on the side. i still have it in my closet somewhere...
Those Walkman buttons would break way too easy. Walkman FTL.
fake kid
Geez! Give them a 8 track or vinyl album and they would REALLY be confused
I feel old already. 13 years old guy feels lost wit d original walkman. Going to search for my walkman.....who knows wat it ll worth down d years(hope it wont be peanuts though).
worth less than a peanut, it costs money to dispose of it correctly.
I can't say I have a Walkman anymore, but I still do listen to cassette tapes quite often -- certain types of music (i.e. late 70's/early 80's punk) just don't sound right in any other format, the grittiness adds to flavor. I don't think that there is one "right way", some things sound better tape, some sound better vinyl (old R&B, hip hop, classic rock, country), some things sound better on CD (metal, techno). For the most part, though, I think that the music is the most important part. For anything portable, you can't beat the convenience of digital -- the collection on my iPod would take up about 700 cassette tapes. It is really silly to be totally dogmatic about formats, but it is nice to be able to enjoy all of them for what they are.
couldn't go for any cassette player it had to be that one!. jesus that thing is old, even by cassette player standards.
mine was a lot smaller than that… thing
Wow I'm 18 and I had a few tapes in the house in the early years - remembering those makes ME feel old XD
LOL...I still have one of those and it still works! Dollar for dollar, it cost significantly more than the ipod of today way back then. I also had a dual deck and would make "mix" tapes of my favorit songs. Used to take it running with me. Left bruises on my hip. Makes yu really appreciate the technology that goes into the lightweight devices of today!
David
Hmm, I'm 22, never had a Walkman but I certainly rocked out with some tapes, just on boomboxes and the like; my house was a pretty damn late adopter to the "compact disc". Ahh, the good old days as an 8-year-old pirate, copying my dad's Mickey Hart tapes, my mom's several-copies-old White Album...when my parents did get a CD player later, I still copied CDs onto tapes so I could play them without getting yelled at for scratching the fragile, opalescent veneers of modern technology (and yeah, he's not the only 13-year-old who could write well at that age, and it's not limited to the British schoul systemme).
But I've never heard of the "metal/normal" dichotomy. Wossit?
It's different types of magnetic coating on the tape.
According to the picture he actually owns an iPhone, not an iPod
/pedant
Wow I cant believe how many people are claiming this kid is fake. I dont know if they realize it but it reflects on their intelligence when they say that a 13 year old cant write or speak like that.
Oh no, my intelligence!
Anyway, the delicious irony in your reply brightened my day, so thanks for that.
I used to coach gymnastics. I gave the high-schoolers (14-18 year olds) the cassette tapes to go through and they looked at them like they were alien devices.
They couldn't figure out how to open the cases (you know, they have those little hinges), and they were always perturbed when the track didn't start at the beginning automatically - that it had to be rewound.
I'm an electrical engineer, (gEEk) so I'm pretty up on technology.
But this was 3 years ago.
I was 20.
I have never felt so dinosaur....
it's like the kid is from the future and he went back in time lol
Walkmans > Discmans. You could barely get through a track without it skipping.
Also, as is the case 99% of the time with this type of article, it will have been heavily subbed by the kid's journalist father.
This kid is an incredible writer for a 13-year-old. I bet his pinewood derby car is also amazing. Hmmm...
A while back I was showing my 9 year old some of the computers from the loft. I loaded a couple of games and explained you had to reload from a cassette every time you switched off the computer.
She looked at me and exclaimed "what, you need to load a tape every time you want to use the internet" Stupid kids.
Feh, that's nothing. Back in the day I had to load Netscape Navigator every day using punch cards.
@Interpol:
whatever n00b. I had to shake up my abacus and rearrange the beads every time I wanted to get on Prodigy.
I had to wait until the shadows of my talisman lined up with the alignment of the planets to get on my BBSes
Oh yeah? I had to send messages in morse code across the country by whacking rhythmically on your mother's enormous derriere, in hopes that the waves would pass through the adipose tissue from one coast to the other, with a minimum signal-to-cellulite ratio.
Phrank wins one nautical mile of internet.
I think it's just some fake news piece... my eight year old knows how a tape player works and that there are two sides. He had a boom box in his room since he was 3! changing out his own veggie tails and wiggles tapes! Just some hack writer trying to come up with concept article "oh yeah today's kids dont know anything about the past" Tapes arent that OLD and outdated... now my 15 year old niece did say she has heard of vinyl but has never really seen one, or knew what an 8track was.
Does anyone remember the"Sound Burger" from Audio technica?
Guess he didn't have dolby active when he recoreded his tape!
And the secret to the shuffle feature was recroding it shuffled!
I wonder how he would react to vinyl...
I remember there was this one walkman that was just barely bigger than the cassette it housed and was silver, I really lusted after that.
I actually have that one. Amazingly small, and a masterpiece of engineering even by today's standards.
Man I know exactly the one! My friend brought it back from China when we were at school, I was jealous for years. How did they actually managed to squeeze everything in there?!
My dad brought me one of these back to England from a business trip in Japan. It was probably months or years before they were officially imported.
To say it caused a stir at school would be a gross understatement. At that time, most people hadn't heard anything in stereo, let alone from a box this small.
It came with a demo tape, with things like racing cars and planes going by. The first time I heard an F1 car drive in one ear and out the other is one I'll never forget.
I don't think any other piece of technology has ever got close to that initial "WOW" factor.
Not stereo... "binaural sound". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording)