Walkman - started teaching us to socially distance 40 years ago

Up to Sony's invention of Walkman, music was primarily a shared experience. "After the Walkman, music could be silence to all but the listener, cocooned within a personal soundscape, which spooled on analog cassette tape" - New Yorker writes on the 40th anniversary of Walkman being shared with the world - "The Walkman wasn’t the end of meeting people, but it paved the way for surviving an unthinkable era in which we would find ourselves unable to meet at all".