The Walkman is just about the size of a compact cassette and is accompanied by a pair of headphones for users to listen to their music individually, on the go. 

The Walkman was created by Sony chairmen Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita who saw an open market for portable music listening devices due to the fact that before 1979 the main ways of listening to cassettes were home or car stereo systems.² The original version of the Walkman (‘TPS-L2’) set itself apart from the conventional tape recorder because it used stereo circuits and light weight headphones, which offered music listeners the opportunity to create a unique, individual music-listening experience.³ It was a huge success all across the globe, selling 186 million units of the cassette version from its launch in July 1979 to 1998.⁴ The Sony Walkman made cassettes that much more successful and solidified them as an iconic piece of music technology in the twentieth century.