The poll offered good news for Apple, however, as participants voted the iPhone into first place. Three of its products appeared in the top ten.
Introduced 32 years ago, the Walkman was the first mass market device to allow to get listen to music beyond their home or car.
Compared to the thousands of songs today’s MP3 players can store, the relatively tiny capacity of Walkman’s cassette tapes – typically around 25 tracks – may seem feeble. But the original Walkman had some features that could make the most up-to-date iPod blush: twin headphone sockets, for example, allowed the user to enjoy music with a friend, and the batteries could be replaced.
“The fact that over 30 years on, the original Sony Walkman is still seen as a greater invention than the iPod is testament to how ground-breaking Sony’s cassette player was,” says Kieran Alger, Editor of T3.com, which conducted the poll.
“It was the first device to make music properly portable, to give us a soundtrack to every day. It changed the way we listened to music and saw the world. We’re still in love with that idea today, forgetting how annoying it was having to fast-forward to your favourite song – or when your tape chewed up altogether.”
The top ten tech inventions of the past 50 years according to T3.com were:
Apple iPhone
Sony Walkman
Apple iPod
Microsoft Windows operating system
Apple iPad
YouTube
Sony Trinitron T
Sky+
VHS video recorder
Source: Telegraph News
