The BBC made a 13-year-old swap his ipod for an original Sony Walkman for a week and then asked him what he thought.   What he said, and I am paraphrasing here, is: “Skuds – you are so old!  How did you ever get by with one of these?”  Well that’s how I interpreted it anyway.Actually I never had a Walkman.  Not a proper one anyway.  When Sony first produced the Walkman it was extremely expensive and I didn’t get a portable until Dixons and Currys started making their own-brand versions.  I remember them well, but not with any great fondness.

I can remember all those times I was crammed in a commuter train from SE London with the cassette player in my pocket.   If I had shoved in a tape that was halfway through, it was almost impossible to extract the player to turn the tape over without causing injury to someone.  Auto-reverse improved my life somewhat.  A lot of the time I just listened to the radio – the Capital Breakfast Show with Graham Deane it would have been.

When portable CD players came along I remember looking at them enviously.  When I got one I was so chuffed until I tried to fit it in a pocket.  The Minidisc player was a vast improvement: all the sound quality advantages of the CD player but in a small size plus the benefit of being able to make up your own compilations like you could with the tape players.

When a friend of mine visited and showed me his Creative mp3 player I was sold on the idea.  I was tempted to get one myself but the thing was the size of a CD player which put me off.  When Apple did their version in a smaller size I couldn’t justify the expense and it wasn’t until about 2001 that I moved into the mp3 age when I got my 20GB iRiver – the same iRiver that now sits by the bed connected to a set of speakers.

Thinking back on all those old toys I have to agree with the boy from the BBC story – how did we ever get by?   Only Friday I saw somebody in Crawley town centre carrying a portable CD player and did a bit of a double-take.  I didn’t think people still used them.

I’m looking forward to 30 years time when the 2039 equivalent of the BBC do a story on the 2039 equivalent of a web site and some kid who will be born in 17 years is given space to ridicule us and our primitive ipods.  He will probably say they are “so 20th Century” or something like that.