Ah yes, the Panasonic Discman, the prime successor to the Phillips Walkman.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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I am really confused now. I know Discman is Sony's name, but generally people refer to any such portable CD player as "discman". At least where I live.
And it's not just regular people, even shops refer to them as dicmans.
Here are some examples to back my claims:
examples
https://www.alza.sk/discmany/18886534.htm
https://aukro.sk/discmany
https://www.mall.sk/discmany
https://discmany.heureka.sk/
https://www.okay.sk/collections/discmany
The only exception seems to be Nay, referring to this category as "Portable CD players".
That’s very interesting! Around me, we called them CD Players, it must be a regional thing. Many people called the portable cassette player a Walkman, even though that was a lineup of products from Sony.
Looking on US Amazon, there are several players that have Discman, Walkman, or both in the titles. Sony must not be enforcing their trademarks (wrong term?) for the first non-sponsored listing being called:
2000mAh Rechargeable Discman CD Player:Walkman CD Player…
Yepp, we all called them Discman back in the day regardless of the brand.
I believe other brands have the same problem.
Velcro is a good example.
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At least it's not a sony ipod
Wasn't the actual "Discman" a Sony product? In the same line as their Walkman cassette players, but for CDs?
I had a Walkman back in the day; but never an official Discman player. All my CD players were pieces of shit 😩
Yes. The pictured item is a portable cd player, not a Discman.
Apparently SL-SK420 or whatever that says didn't have the same ring to it.
This is an interesting phenomenon called a proprietary eponym, where a brand name becomes synonymous with a product.
Just like walkman and disc man, in my language we call a car satnav a "TomTom" after the brand that popularised it here.
Here is the scene from the Clerks cartoon about adhesive strips.
Yeap, Discman was the name used by Sony up until around the year 2000, when they changed it to "CD Walkman".
Man that one can play mp3 discs. That has to be newer than 2002. Burning CDs wasn't super common yet.
I had a aftermarket head unit that played mp3 cds in 2002.
I had a mp3 player in 1999.
We were definitely burning cds back then, this woulda come at a premium but the tech was there.
I remember downloading mp3s from usenet in 1999 on my Windows 95 computer. I'd start the download, go to work, then retrieve the file when I got home.
I felt so fancy buying a CD burner at Best Buy so I could burn them onto CDs. It was the first PC component I ever installed by myself.
We share pretty similar experiences with this. Only that in 1999 both our ISDN lines were in use during the day. That robbed me of the possibility of continuously downloading files, getting home and start enjoying the downloads.
I remember being bummed by this back in the day.
My brother had an mp3 player in 1999. I think it had 16MB of storage space. I didn't see the point of it when you could only put like 5 songs on the thing.
I could fit roughly 1 hour of music on mine, longer if I dropped the bitrate to 96kbps instead of 128.
The biggest benefit of the mp3 player was that the anti-skip protection didn’t drain the battery twice as fast, no moving parts so it never skipped. This seemed super cool to me because I skateboarded and stuff and generally liked the idea of no skips.
The biggest benefit of the mp3 player was that the anti-skip protection didn’t drain the battery twice as fast
I strongly disagree. In those days, mp3 players that fit single CDs that were slightly larger than a modern day thumb drive. And you could get 128mb ones for slightly more money. But that was much smaller and more portable than something that had to fit an entire CD.
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I had that very device right about 2002. Put my whole CD collection on a few mp3 disks. Replaced it a few years later with a 6GB mp3 player.
Me too! I think it was around 2007 that i got an iRiver H10. My only other standalone music player I ever bought with my own money.
That's awesome, I had an iRiver as well. Ended up putting custom firmware on it after a bit as the original firmware was buggy at times and lacked features. The device itself was surprisingly capable and could even play video.
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Sure it was, in America at least. I think I got my first PC that could burn disks in like 1998 and it was a mass marketed Compaq from Circuit City. Napster showed up the next year and CD burning exploded. Napster was dead by 2001.
I had this exact model in 2002. It was a revelation and possibly one of the best portable CD players ever released. You could sit there and tap it all day and it wouldn't skip.
My car around 03 had a shit cassette deck that ate tapes. The mp3 discman with a cassette adapter was a game changer.
I had the entire Atari Teenage Riot and Mindless self Influence discography on one disk.
I'm sure the bit rate was abysmal, but with that kind of music it is kind of a feature.
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Museum ≠ old.
I'm sure there are mp3 players in museums as well.
The Colorado Railroad Museum has railroad crossing signals donated by BNSF that are only a few years old. Museums will gladly accept both old and new.
Yup. I'm pretty sure the Computer Museum out in Mountain View has stuff on display that's less than 5 years old in some of their "progress of technology" type displays. I think when I last went there a couple years ago, for gaming history they had all the latest (at the time) consoles as well. It was pretty funny seeing something like a PS4 in a history museum though.
Does it belong in a museum if the essential same device is still sold? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MDY28Q1/ I mean sure you can get a 200 year old coffee grinder… but that's 200 years not 22.
If I bought one today, I'd spend the extra $10 for a rechargeable unit. The one bad memory I have of these was having to replace the batteries so frequently.
You can use rechargeable batteries in it... Built in rechargeable batteries suck. The entire lifespan of the device is tied to that battery. Give me something that runs on AAs any day.
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Whoa...they have a USB-C rechargeable one.
You know, if they sold an audiophile one, with clean electronics, a good built in amp, and the ability to play FLAC files (microSD port), I'd buy one.
Laughs/Cries in cassette based Walkman.
Hold onto that. The cassette mechanisms that are produced now are absolute trash. There's literally no manufacturer on earth who makes a good one anymore.
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Kinda off-topic, but I honestly miss the in-line remotes high-end Discman & portable Minidisc players used to have..
Really wish they would make a come-back in some way, maybe as a supplemental Bluetooth device?
I had that exact model. Only CD player I ever bought new, portable or otherwise.
I had the exact same model !
That was legit the best MP3 CD player. It never skips no matter how much you shake it and it builds a different, but consistent shuffle playlist depending on what song was playing when you hit shuffle.
I mean it was over twenty one years ago. Technology ages fast. You can also say it had historical significance so it can end up in a museum earlier than you might expect.
I've seen consoles like the Sega Genesis and the Master System in a temporary exposition and end up taking photos since I haven't seen one for so long lmao
I like the design, I got a Sony CD Walkman last month, and I love it.
I had that exact model. And I was cool, wearing my over the ear headphones.
2002? Didn't they rename the Discman line to the CD Walkman around this time?
I remember seeing a Patreon exclusive video of a CD Walkman from 2003. I'm not sure if this is the first one to bear that name or not.
First time I felt truly old is when Digital Foundry made retro review of Batman Arkham Origins. They only consider a game retro if it's ten years old.
You guys thinking what I'm thinking? HEIST
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