The Clone Wars! One of the few articles about the Walkman Clones. I though Kasuga was a niche brand, were they part of Toshiba? I don't think they made many units. You Too Can Afford Unicef's Walkie, New Nation, 1981
This is part of a one-page newspaper ad, I'll post all of the sections. For those too young, Pele was a international soccer superstar in the 70's, from 1981
And here it is on the Epson website https://global.epson.com/company/corporate_history/milestone_products/16_et10.html It is amazing how far LCDs have come in the last forty years. From black on white with just a hundred or so segments used in calculators and watches to 8 Million pixels on a 98" screen!
I'd read the blurbs in magazines and newspapers, I think Sinclair had the marketing muscle, he seemed to get a lot of press for his micro-TV effort but in the end Epson won. Funny thing was I always thought Epson was a USA Based Company, I used to love their printers, they ran forever.
Sony SRF-201 from 1985 another oddball Walkman, these are so small and use a different style headphone jack.
I think the big achievement was the colour LCD, fast enough to display video. A colour CRT tube has so many electrodes etc there is a minimum length irrespective of screen size. I have a 2.2" Panasonic Colour TV which I must dig out and take some photos of sometime, but it is about 10" (25cm) deep, so would require a very large pocket. I have always thought of the company as Seiko-Epson with Seiko mainly making timekeeping stuff and Epson printers. I would guess this TV was a natural progression from the rather pointless Seiko TV watch. Regarding company origins for years I thought Fisher and Marantz were as Japanese as Sony, as we never saw the American products here. The American company for printers was Centronic, who the once common parallel printer port was named after.
I'm trying not to double post these articles but some may be duplicates or different papers with the same article. This would be a fun session to attend! The Straits Times, 1984
There was no writing on the wall yet in 1994. ScreamTracker 3 module (S3M) and Mod files in general you get from bulletin boards, magazine CDs, etc. Fond memories of Axel F and so on through my external Compaq speakers. However, these were nothing like the relatively well compressed MP3 files that would become mainstream a few years later, compared to the extremely slow to exchange and very expensive to store full fidelity, uncompressed WAV files. Well compressed in a balance of audio quality versus file size, for the non audiophile at least.
