Send your track
EN EnglishJA 日本語DE DeutschFR FrançaisZH ZHES ESPT PTKO KORU RU
Sign inSign up
Reset
Retro
Why Sony Can't Bring Back the Classic Walkman - The Story of an Industry That Fell Apart
Why Sony Can't Bring Back the Classic Walkman - The Story of an Industry That Fell Apart

The idea comes up every year on the anniversary: "Sony should relaunch a real Walkman." The Obsolete Sony blog explains, with figures and parts as evidence, why it would be almost impossible today for the Japanese giant. A lesson on the silent disappearance of industrial know-how.</accroche> <parameter name="contenu">We have been following for a long time the small community that, on Substack, restores Walkman TPS-L2, WM-DD, or WM-EX models. This week, one of them - the blog **Obsolete Sony** - publishes an analysis that reached the front page of Hacker News (58 points, 50 comments) and answers a question that nostalgics regularly ask themselves: why doesn't Sony simply relaunch a "classic" cassette Walkman for the retro market? ## The fantasy of a modern Walkman The context is real: the audio cassette has made a statistically measurable comeback in recent years, driven by the indie scene and a nostalgia effect. Persistance Ltd, We Are Rewind, or even FiiO have launched new cassette players. Sony, owner of the **Walkman** brand since 1979, did release in 2019 the NW-A100TPS celebrating the 40th anniversary of the product - but it was a digital audio player disguised as a retro Walkman with a screen, not a real cassette mechanism. ## What has physically disappeared The Obsolete Sony post methodically outlines the problem. A classic Walkman is not a software that you recompile: it's a miniaturized mechanism assembled from dozens of specific parts. - The **flat DC motors** that drove the capstans, with the speed precision necessary to avoid wow, were manufactured by workshops that, for the most part, have either closed or converted their lines to other uses since the 2000s. - The **hi-fi heads** (permalloy, then sendust) were produced in-house in a dedicated line. The skills still exist with a few individuals, but the industrial tooling has been dismantled. - The **plastics and gaskets** themselves, molded in specific materials to maintain mechanical precision over the years, depended on tier 3 suppliers now absent from the address book. In short, Sony no longer has **the complete supply chain** nor the associated mechanical engineering teams. Rebuilding this chain for a niche product with small volumes makes no economic sense: it would mean recreating an industry to sell, at best, a few tens of thousands of units per year. ## The alternative: third-party manufacturers This is why the new cassette player market has been rebuilt **outside** of Sony. Persistance Ltd (in the UK), We Are Rewind (with its AF1 Cassette Player launched in 2023), or FiiO manufacture new units that capture the spirit of the Walkman, without ever reaching the mechanical precision of the originals - because the original components simply can't be found anymore. ## Why it's a case study What Obsolete Sony tells goes beyond the Walkman. It's the story of a Japanese industrial know-how from the 1980s, that of high-precision mechanical miniaturization, which was not passed on because there was no longer an economic reason to do so. The digital player, then the smartphone, made the chain unnecessary - and an unnecessary industrial supply chain disappears in a decade. This is not a trial of Sony: it's what happens to any mature technology once the market abandons it. Current owners of working TPS-L2 Walkmans possess, without necessarily knowing it, **strictly irreplaceable objects**. The restorers of the scene - including Obsolete Sony - play, on their scale, the role of maintainers of a material heritage. For us who follow the Japanese underground and its relationship with technology, it's a reminder: nostalgia is not enough to revive an industry. On-site, there must be workshops, trained engineers, and supplier lines three or four levels deep. Sony has lost all of this for the cassette - and it's irreversible.</parameter>

walkmansonyindustry

Jul 24, 2026 3 1

T
Toshiro Hayashi
Read
Retro
Visual 6502: Opening the Hood of a Legendary CPU in a Simple Browser Tab
Visual 6502: Opening the Hood of a Legendary CPU in a Simple Browser Tab

A team of enthusiasts once depolished a MOS 6502, photographed each transistor under a microscope, and reconstructed its simulation in JavaScript. Fifteen years later, Visual 6502 is still running in a browser and remains, in our eyes, one of the most beautiful pedagogies of silicon ever made. We remember the shock, the first time a team member stumbled upon `visual6502.org`: an entire CPU, the one that powered our Apple II or our Commodore 64, simulated in JavaScript directly in the browser—not abstractly with registers and memory slots, but **transistor by transistor**, with the copper tracks lighting up to the rhythm of the clock signal. The link is back on the front page of Hacker News (69 points, 20 comments), and we went back to play. ## A CPU born in 1975, still alive in our machines The MOS 6502, released by MOS Technology in 1975 and initially sold for $25 when an Intel 8080 cost more than $100, populated the machines that made us love computing: Apple II (Steve Wozniak, 1977), Commodore PET then VIC-20 and C64, Atari 400/800 and Atari 2600, BBC Micro, and, in a derived version, Nintendo's NES (1983) in the form of the Ricoh 2A03. A small chip of about 3,500 transistors, etched at the time in 8 microns, which durably defined what an affordable personal computer was. ## What Visual 6502 does The project, launched by Greg James, Barry Silverman, and Brian Silverman, is based on a rare heritage approach: decapsulating a real chip, photographing its die under a high-resolution microscope, manually retracing the layout of the transistors, and then reconstructing the logic from the topology. The result lives on `visual6502.org`: the JavaScript simulation, published as an open project since 2010, does not model abstract logic gates—it propagates the electrical state at the level of each transistor and each track. Concretely, in the **JSSim** tab, you can: - advance half a clock cycle at a time and see the signals propagate in color on the die; - inspect any register (accumulator, X, Y, stack pointer, PC) in real time; - inject a small program in machine language directly into the simulated memory and run it; - observe how a seemingly simple instruction like `LDA #$05` physically sets precise paths in the chip in motion. It's slow—the page runs in the browser, not on GPU. It's also quite rough in terms of interface. But for someone who grew up typing `POKE` on a C64 without ever seeing what was happening behind the scenes, it's about the most moving thing you can do in 2026 with a Chrome tab. ## Why it still matters There are faster, prettier 6502 simulators, better integrated into modern IDEs. None do what Visual 6502 does: materialize the idea that a microprocessor is **a physical object**, a tangle of doped silicon, and not a Wikipedia abstraction. The same collective has indeed extended the approach to Motorola's 6800 and Atari's 2600 processor (the TIA), using the same method: decap, microphoto, reconstruction. In an era where we talk about chip design as we would about a SaaS service—"we've signed with TSMC for 3 nm"—going back to an 8-micron die that you can look at through an optical microscope does a world of good. ## Key takeaways - **Visual 6502** simulates the MOS 6502 transistor by transistor in a browser, based on photographs of a real die. - The project, launched around 2010 by Greg James, Barry Silverman, and Brian Silverman, remains online at `visual6502.org` and also covers the 6800 and the TIA of the Atari 2600. - **Try it here**: http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html - load the simulator, let it run, and finally see what the processor of your first computer was doing, physically.

computer sciencehistorymicroprocessor

Jul 24, 2026 2 1

T
Toshiro Hayashi
Read
LIVERadio Geek Kitsune
Tap to listen, the same sound for everyone
0··
// Schedule
// all stations
// share a track →
GEEK きつねG狐GEEK きつねG狐
Sign inSign up
Topics
Explore
Information