Happy Birthday! This week is the 30th birthday of the good old Sony Walkman.

Walkmans are not easy to find anymore, in today's age of having small mp3 devices holding more music than you can ever listen to in five lifetimes, but we still have a couple that the kids use with their story tapes (we still have a lot of tapes at home).

In honor of the 30th birthday of the Walkman, the BBC got a kid to trade in his mp3 player for a week and use a Walkman instead, and then compare the two.

The result is a funny article of how the kid describes using a Walkman.

From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets. It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.
[...]
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
[...]
Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle", where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

See the BBC article for some laughs and some nostalgia...

(hattip: techcrunch)