My grandmother, in her lifetime, went from horse-drawn carriages to spaceships. As for me? I have a vivid memory from 1968: I’m sitting at my desk at school reading a science fiction story in which everyone had a computer on their desks, and I remember wondering if I’d ever live to see the day.

Yeah, well, technological change is relentless. To quote Vin Diesel, “It comes at us fast and furiously” – so fast that sometimes we don’t have time to reflect on how profoundly technology changes our habits, our culture, our lives.

This week we’re going to note a pair of products that were transformative. First, we’re going to set our Wayback Machine to…

…July 1, 1979. That was the day Sony introduced the Walkman in Japan. The company wouldn’t release it in the US for another year. The Walkman is now an icon of the consumer electronics industry, but in 1979, it was a gamble. The trend at the time was music players getting bigger.

The 1960s saw the introduction of transistor radios, which were amazingly small and portable. They also reproduced sound poorly – especially the lows. Legendary music producer Phil Spector built his Wall of Sound to compensate for the shortcomings of portable radios. By the end of the ’70s, portable radios had been left behind. The market was about boomboxes, and the bigger the better. It got to the point where the big ones were practically the size of Volkswagen Beetles. Boomboxes all had radios, but they were mostly for playing cassette tapes. Some of them had pretty excellent sound, and were loud enough to drown out a room.

And then Sony introduces this portable cassette player that nobody had asked for. This is one of the original ads. You really must see it. Check it out on YouTube, or you can see it on the podcast web page where we have it embedded.

BRIAN SANTO: The Walkman was basically a stripped-down version of a recorder created for professional journalists. That hadn’t sold very well. The Walkman was so stripped down it didn’t even record, it just played. But it became a phenomenon quickly enough. You see, people had grown tired of being assaulted by boombox owners blasting their music as loud as possible. The Walkman was great for keeping down noise pollution. You could tune other people out, and no one would even know you were listening to the Captain & Tennille and give you a hard time about it. It fit in a purse or a pocket.

That it was cassette-based is important. You couldn’t record on your Walkman, but odds were high you had a deck at home that could record. And if you loved music, odds were that you were making mix tapes, for your own enjoyment, and to share your music with others. The way we listen to music today, probably on some personal device, and when we share, we share playlists – all of that started with the Walkman and cassette tapes.

The Walkman would shatter records for the fastest-selling consumer electronics item in history to that time. One of the very few things that would sell more units faster would be the iPhone.

Speaking of which, we’re going to jump back into the Wayback Machine, set for…

… June 27, 2007. That was the first day that the iPhone went on sale. There was little in the iPhone that was new. Other phones had already had touchscreens and a camera or would run programs – or apps. Apple’s genius was to combine them into an entire environment that included a high-quality technological object with premium support services.

Conceptually speaking, the iPhone was the natural heir of the Walkman. The Walkman product line made it from cassette to CDs to MP3s, but by the end there, the Walkman was limping. Apple’s iPods were the most popular MP3 players and, as we know, the functionality of MP3 players was subsumed by smartphones.

A lot of things were subsumed into iPhones, or got eaten by iPhones, and to be fair, plenty of other smartphones. A lot of people no longer have separate phones, music players, or cameras – still or video. A lot of people no longer need separate remotes for the their audio equipment or their TVs, nor for any of their home automation products. It’s amazing how many different gadgets we used to have just 13 years ago, and how quickly we adapted to not having them.

Speaking of technological change, a buddy of mine just sent me a note, written on a manual typewriter.

(SFX: typewriter)

There’s a sound you don’t hear anymore. It’s been a long time. You know, maybe some of you have never heard it, except in old movies.

So anyway, I got a typewritten note last week. It’s the first time I’d seen such a thing in … I don’t know … maybe 30 years? Maybe even longer. It made me think about getting a manual typewriter of my own. But I probably won’t.

Hey, that’s it for the Weekly Briefing for the week ending July 3rd. Thank you for listening. The Weekly Briefing is available on all the major podcast platforms, but if you get to us via our website you’ll find a transcript along with links to the stories we mentioned, and with other multimedia. Visit www.eetimes.com and click where it says RADIO to find the full archive of podcasts.

This podcast is Produced by AspenCore Studio. It was Engineered by Taylor Marvin and Greg McRae at Coupe Studios. The Segment Producer was Kaitie Huss.

I’m Brian Santo. A Happy 4th to all of you in the US, and we’ll see you all next week.