The tape recorder division in Sony were stressing out about inventing a sales product in 1979 when they accidentally—while messing around with their Pressman (Sony’s portable cassette recorder)—came across a small cassette player that was capable of stereo playback.  Akio Morita, Sony chairman and founder, quickly marketed the TPS-L2 Walkman and it became a complete hit.  Sony had some trouble naming the device, as “Walky” was already at the time being used by Toshiba for their portable radio line.  They decided on Walkman, but was hesitant in doing so for they thought the national markets would look down upon the name and consider it a Japanese phrase clumsily made into English.  They considered marketing the product as Sound-About in the US and as Stowaway in the UK, but decided against that and pushed through with Walkman.
Walkman provided the people with the ability to carry around their own choice of music.  Many hit pop songs were written about the invention of Walkman, including Cliff Richard’s “Wired for Sound”.  Like all extremely popular consumer products, Sony’s Walkman became duplicated by a countless amount of companies and it soon had many clones floating about on the market.  Walkman was “in” until around when we were in 5^th or 6^th grade, when they were dually used with Discmans (also by Sony).  That’s the time when MD, or minidisk players, burst into the market and became extremely popular among the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean costumers.  I believe they never really became a new wave in the US.  MDs were soon followed by MP3 players, which hit the mass market in the US.

*Pictures from http://cbingoimage.naver.com/data/bingo_86/imgbingo_33
monya89/21899/monya89_4.jpg and http://pocketcalculatorshow.com/walkman/graphics/walkman-logo-cyan.jpg, respectively

Sources:
NHN Corp. Monya. 12 Oct 2003. <http://cbingoimage.naver.com/data/bingo_86/imgbingo_33
monya89/21899/monya89_4.jpg>

Pocket Calculator. Cyan Walkman Logo. 12 Oct 2003. <http://pocketcalculatorshow.com/walkman/graphics/walkman-logo-cyan.jpg>

Pocket Calculator. Walkman History 101. 12 Oct 2003. <http://pocketcalculatorshow.com/walkman/history.html>

Wikipedia. Walkman. 12 Oct 2003. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman>

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