The original Sony Walkman is 30 years old as it was originally introduced in 1979. I do distinctly remember these things from my childhood. I never specifically owned a true Sony model (only the cool kids were able to afford one), but the word Walkman was so widely used that it was the standard term used to describe a portable cassette player. In today’s age this hasn’t changed, except that we call any portable MP3 player an iPod whether made by Apple or not.

The Walkman was originally blue, however this didn’t last long as the vast majority of models were gray. And for whatever reason, Sony was able to make gray look cool in the 1980s.

As a sorta/kinda experiment, a teenager was asked to use one of these clunkers for a week instead of an iPod to see if he could figure it out.

A few quotes from that article:

• "When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks…"
• "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape."
• "I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser…"
• "I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly…"

Go ahead and rest the rest from the link above. Good stuff.

As an interesting end note, audio compact discs were released to market only one year after the Walkman was introduced – and it’s still the standard audio format sold today.

When hosting PCMech Live I have been asked more than a few times if it’s possible to run Linux on the PS3. The answer is yes, you can if you use the box as a development environment. Slashdot has an article on how you can put Fedora on a PS3 box with extra tips and tricks to get the most performance out of the unit.

Originally it wasn’t easy to get *nix to work on the PS3 but now it’s much easier than it was before.

So if you have a PS3 and were looking to do something different and interesting, there’s your project – with documentation.