Quiet music

big hair,baggy pants and Michael Jackson on your Walkman.

It may be impossible,a mere 30 years later,to understand how that metal box represented a landmark in usability. A vivid example: the BBC handed the original Walkman to a 13-year-old boy,and asked him to use it for a week and record how he felt. Naturally,he was laughed at a bit; but he seemed to view it,further,as shockingly inconvenient it doesnt have a shuffle mode for songs and as truly arcane technology it took him three days to realise you have to turn cassettes over. But,in the end,the Walkmans primary innovation is still the one that far more user-friendly MP3 players still offer: a private bubble of music,a soundtrack to your life. It changed public spaces and concepts of privacy for ever.

The portable cassette player might be dead. And Sony lost personal music to the iPod because it didnt embrace the open-source MP3 format. But the Walkman might be revived as open-source messiah: Sonys tying up with Google to give Walkmans the Internet and open-source programming. Its still a powerful brand: PC World recently called it the greatest tech gadget in history. It might be too soon to assume that its dead at 30.