Sony's proto-Walkman that went to the moon*

july 2019 so a couple of important anniversaries the 21st of July being the 50th anniversary of man first walking on the moon and the first of July well that was the 40th anniversary of the first Sony Walkman but what if I could show you something that connects those two things together and it's kept inside this rather ominous looking black box okay let's lift the lid on this one you are looking at a Sony CC 50 cassette recorder a marvel of miniaturization from 1968 it really doesn't look unusually small there were days but this really was quite a feat of engineering a full decade before the first Sony Walkman the TC 50 was the smallest cassette recorder at the time and when combined with the easy to load Philips compact cassettes it made the ideal tape recorder to accompany the astronauts on the Apollo missions and in May 1969 a TC 50 orbited the moon on Apollo 10 now if you've seen the film first man you'll have briefly seen a sony TC 50 floating around the spacecraft playing music I've got no idea how much this set cost back in the day but you can tell that it certainly wasn't cheap just look at this inspection card signed with care by three people now I imported this set from Japan and it also contains the original accessories including a cassette tape in a cardboard box there's nothing of historical interest on the tape though the interest here lies in the TC 50 and its place in history it's got an interesting three button control system where the middle push button changes its function depending upon the position of the play lever in the stop position the button activates rewind but when the tapes playing holding it down will play the tape forward at double speed recording is achieved by holding down the red button whilst also moving the lever into the play position which is marked on this machine as forward and there's also a record level indicator which doubles as a battery monitor and importantly these simple controls could be operated easily even whilst wearing gloves which came in and on the reverse side is a speaker but notice how Sonia we're referring to the cassette at this point as the magazine Matic a term that's also used on the box along with their preference to use the word tape Corder rather than the more common tape recorder a practice that they continue to follow for years there's a built-in microphone on the side of the machine something that was unusual at this time when most marks were kept separate on a wire to avoid picking up motor noise the TC 15 comparison was designed to be a tape recorder that you could use in one hand one thing that's sadly missing from my set though is the original NiCad battery pack ironically when I bought this earlier in the year that battery wasn't permitted to fly from Japan to the UK and yet fifty years ago one went to the moon that's progress for you it wouldn't be much used nowadays anyway though but it would be nice to keep the whole set complete the volume control is marked PB vol to show only effects the playback another record level these two plastic Stoppers at the top of what the door rests on when it's open and there's very little plastic in this machine all the cassette compartment is made out of metal as a strip of velvet along the bottom though over the head cover and that's there to ensure that when the spring-loaded door is closed it does so silently it's this kind of attention to detail it shows the care that went into putting this together above the wrist strap on the side we've got the DC power input that I'll be using later on we've got an earphone output and then at the top we've got a microphone input with a remote control socket I've got the microphone here of course and you can see there is a beautiful minimalist 1960s design now when this plugs into the machine it plugs into both the mic and the remote sockets which means that the switch on the front so the bike is able to start and stop the machine recording and if you'd like that same functionality to be able to start and stop the recorder easily but whilst using the built-in microphone then you can plug this accessory into the side which effectively acts like a pause button given that this is approximately 50 years old it should come as no surprise that it isn't working this is something I knew when I bought it I really just got it to show as a non-functional proper historic object but I decided to try and see if I could get it to play a tape as so I downloaded the service manual to see how it came apart and bought its a new belt the disassembly instructions were incredibly brief just listing the screws that needed to be removed a total of two from the control panel one from the leaver and four from the cover now once that cover was removed out really did expect to be able to see the belt but it turns out there was still quite some weight to go this thing is packed in like a sandwich of slightly cramped together components it looks like every millimeter of internal space has been put to some use the only other screws mentioned in the disassembly guide were the two holding the head cover in place but removing those didn't get me any closer to the belts obviously the only remaining screws left that I could see were on the back plate but after removing all four of those I found this didn't lead anywhere either I have to approach things from the other side by finding some way to remove that circuit board and get underneath it now under the plastic film that covers a circuit board I found two screws that went through it and then there was another screw attached to a metal bracket but even with those removed the board still refused to budge now after much head scratching I decided to try peeling back that leather lock cover from the side and found another three concealed screws that weren't mentioned anywhere in that service manual so yeah thanks for that so what you've just watched in two minutes approximately occurred over the course of about an hour but finally I could get to the belt and whilst it was a very tight squeeze I was able to extract the old one and put the new one in its place now I've got to point out that the belt is the least of this machine's troubles all the components in here are well beyond their specified number of years it should be working for well I'd imagine there are I mean it's amazing anything's working in here at all but it is barely functioning putting the power in I'm getting the things moving around as they should do but the speed tends to slow down after a while and speed up again it probably needs all you capacitors in fact it needs all new everything but I'm not going to do all that because really this thing should just be enjoying its retirement inside a glass case I just wanted to show it functioning one final time but you've got to bear in mind that the sound quality of this is the going to be what it would have been when this thing was new it's amazing it's still doing anything one thing I often see criticism of is Saudis insistence on using sensor negative on their barrel plug connectors but it's handy for me because this more modern adapter can power this older device but also it shows that they've been using this setup for 50 years now so perhaps we should have got used to it by now [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now I didn't record anything on this because it barely works long enough for me to be able to demonstrate these sections here but you can see how the microphone operates the machine remotely as does the little add-on remote control on the side but if I wanted to record something on a tape recorder I'm not good to be using this I've got a couple of other machines in the house I could use instead this is more of a collector's piece but you've seen how all the functions would have worked when it was new let's compare it against the Sony Walkman that came along a decade later you can see the family resemblance however the Walkman is noticeably lighter as well as being a little bit thinner of course Sony didn't just jump from 1968 TC 50 to 1979 STP SL to Walkman now after the TC 50 other handheld recorders followed like this TC 55 from 1972 the ads in a tape counter more recognizable controls as well as incorporates that remote start/stop button into the body and drops the name magazine Matic in favour of the more familiar cassette Corder then there's 1978 CCM 600 which looks uncannily like the first Walkman and if you know the story behind the creation of the Walkman then you'll know why that is the founder of Sony who by the late 1970s had the position of Adri chairman enjoyed listening to his music cassettes while he traveled he did this by touching headphones to the stereos only TCD five portable however this was a bulky setup so one day he asked the engineers if they could come up with something a little bit smaller the engineers took their latest pressman recorder aka the CCM 600 which had come out in 1978 they removed the recording secretary and speaker upgraded the tape had an amplification circuitry to stereo and so the first Walkman prototype was born the following year the first commercial Walkman was brought to market accompanied by new lightweight headphones but they didn't really expect to sell many because they thought who other than their chairman would be interested in a cassette player that couldn't record this initial reticence explains that minimal redesigned from the TCM 600 they just didn't want to put too much effort into engineering something that might be a flop that Walkman though and all that others that follow Oh their existence to Sony's range of handheld recorders that date back to 1968 s revolutionary TC 50 this book about Sony's designs mentions an interesting fact about the TC 50 when Sony were coming up with a design for their first handheld cassette recorder they chose to make the shape of it echo the shape of the cassette this nineteen sixties decision to mimic the proportions of the cassettes in the machine that the cassette goes in is a decision that shaped the look of the Walkman and was one that carried on being mirrored in machines for decades to come we become so accustomed to the shape of a Walkman it's something you'd never likely to have given a second thought and of course yes in later years it was all about making the smallest possible machine that could still hold a tape inside it but back when they started out they did have a choice they could have gone in a different direction as demonstrated by this Philips DCC machine which doesn't attempt to mimic the shape of a DCC perhaps deliberately as a way to differentiate itself from these standard cassette Walkmans one of the so did CC 50s that traveled on Apollo 12 is now an exhibit in the Smithsonian my machine on the other hand is kept in a black box on a shelf mine didn't really do anything significant well other than do its little bit in helping to kick off a personal or revolution so please feel free to file this video under tenuous links as well as someone tried to cash in on an anniversary of a historic event however I really did think it was interesting that 40 years ago this came out and fifty years ago one of these went to the moon but that is it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you did you know that man never set foot on the moon door you're not one of those conspiracy clowns are you I'm sick to death of all these believing idiots there were days no that's not what I meant just because they can't put their trousers on without falling over they think it's impossible for anyone else to do anything more complicated no I was just saying and if you ever thought it's weird how these conspiracy theorists won't believe the experts but they'll put a hundred percent trust in what one bloke posts on these MySpace page no honestly I'm not one of those what I meant was that the astronauts who landed on the moon were wearing boots why does that matter while everyone's saying that it's 50 years since man set foot on the moon but their feet never touch the moon surface they actually set boot on the moon okay so let's bring this back down to earth you told me earlier on that it's ten years since you went to New York right yeah did you walk around there with your bare feet well no I'm not crazy I'd rather lick the screen of a smartphone that I found in a cruise ships toilet well then by your logic you've never set foot in New York true but I did breathe in the air eat the food and interact with the friendly locals they didn't do any of those things on the moon no your eye and they didn't even take the subway exactly right hold on let me take my shoes on socks off why well I'm going to set foot in your kitchen for the first time ever because up till now I've only ever been in there with my shoes on and apparently that no longer counts so this is going to be a whole new experience okay while you're in there can you put the kettle on this dogs been sick on the floor I wish I'd kept my shoes on stupid idea both this [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 395,123

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Sony TC-50, Sony Walkman, Anniversary, First Walkman, 1979, 1969, Personal Stereo, History, original, taperecorder, tapecorder, magazinematic, handheld, first man, TPS-L2, T-50, Sony, walkman, proto, retrotech, audio, hifi

Id: oJXRVyszFbo

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

So Neil Armstrong is the real Star-Lord?

[u/mynamestaken12]

Techmoan is the best

[u/Multigrain_Looneybin]

Cool tapecorder, I've got a very nice TC-40 in original box with all the paperwork and even an old ass unopened earbud. The play mechanism and the level meter look exactly the same. Still works great but didn't have that NICAD battery pack, just AA cells. Old Sony stuff was super well built!

[u/Iamjacquelin]

Nice! I think the first time it went into orbit was Apollo 7.