Ah yes, the Panasonic Discman, the prime successor to the Phillips Walkman.
Glad I’m not the only one who got a twitchy eye reading that.
I thought to myself for the briefest of moments: Am I being Mandela Effect’d?
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/discmanyThe only exception seems to be Nay, referring to this category as “Portable CD players”.
Yeah we called them all discman too. A Kleenex/tissue situation imo.
Edit: though I do concede an official label in some sort of display probably should use the generic form “portable CD player” or something similar.
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…
At least it’s not a sony ipod
This thing is so recent it could play MP3s… The first Discman was released in 1984. I’m actually really confused why they picked such a recent version, the technology was almost phased out when this thing was released. FFS the original iPod came out a year before this thing…
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 😩
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.
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.
BMWs in 2002 used Alpine head units. I knew their aftermarket units could play MP3 CDs so I thought “why not test it out?” Turns out it could play it just fine. It mapped the folder buttons to the seek/scan buttons if you held it and played them just fine. I was floored it did that but wasn’t anywhere in the manual.
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.
Is this your kid nephew’s “museum”?
“Old” is not 20 years and that is not a goddamn discman. Sorry, Ralphie. You can do better.
Fuck this brings back great memories. I used to supply my whole school with CDs and tapes of people’s favourite music. I always threw in a couple of extra songs with a similar feel and style if there was extra space. I was the only one that had the tech so I was like a queen in my school until mp3 players came around.
It reminds me when I was visiting my older brother in Spain and we went to a tech museum. There was a Sinclair Spectrum and me and my brother were thilled to see it. My niece was astonished fisrt then she was picking on us for hours non stop" you’re a pair of dinosaurs" “you belong to a museum” “any plans for retirement” . When I told my wife she was like “well you’re almost forty honey” ☠️
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.
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.
Wasn’t Discman a Sony brand?
Yes. Just like Walkman is.
warehouse staff have already removed the artifact for safe keeping and replaced it with a hastily-sourced replica.
