The device that invented the idea of taking your music library with you — decades before an iPod or a phone could do the same.
Sony Walkman was a genuine nationwide craze decades before "going viral" was a phrase — and it's still made and sold today. This is a genuine pre-internet product — a real, nationwide sales phenomenon decades before social media existed, spread by nothing but word of mouth, in-store demonstration, and traditional advertising. Many of these are still in production today, largely unchanged.
Released in 1979, the Walkman turned personal, portable music listening from a niche idea into a mainstream cultural habit, and became one of the defining status objects of the 1980s.