Sony Watchman: Must-see TV

In the early 1980s, two things were probably true about your TV. One, it was enormous. And two, it was at your house. They were in family rooms, in TV rooms. It was a place that you went to watch TV. But what if you're at church and you'd rather be watching the baseball game? Or what if you're at your kid's baseball game and you'd rather watch, frankly, anything else at all? Well, Sony, maker of the Walkman, changer of the way that we all listen to music, has something for you. It's called the Watchman, and it brings your TV absolutely anywhere. From the VirginVox media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. Today, we are talking about the Watchman, the biggest portable TV you've maybe ever seen, but also kind of the future of TV. Stay tuned. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, an audit dread. It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance, or call it, calm appliance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Get started at vanta.com slash calm. When is the AI bubble going to burst? How do you AI proof your job? How should colleges handle AI and prepare students for a shifting job market? I'm Henry Blodgett, and on my show Solutions, I've been exploring all of those questions and more with experts who have actual answers. We hear enough about our problems. Let's solve them. Follow Solutions with Henry Blodgett. All right, we're back. Let's talk Watchman. Allison Johnson's here. Hi, Allison. Hello. V-Song. Hello. Hello. Okay, we just need to do this right at the beginning. Is it Watchman, Watchman, or something else? Watchman. Yeah, I've been saying Watchman. I see, I agree. Yeah. Watchman is an Alan Moore comic starring a blue guy. Okay. And Rorschach. I don't remember any of the other people. Blue guy and Rorschach. Yeah. Okay, I agree. I will say every other person we are going to hear from in the course of this episode will disagree with that assessment. But I'm going to call it the Watchman because it's the Walkman. And it's like, if somebody was like, oh, do you want to listen to my Walkman? I'd be like, what? Excuse me? I don't like that. I wouldn't trust that person. It's only Walkman if you have two of them because then it's a plural because I don't think Walkman's works. So if you have two Sony Watchmen, it has to be two of them. Watchmans. Because like the Watchmans just sounds wrong. It's like I got my two Watchmans. I like it. It's funny. But you can say like I have both my Watchmen and my purse. I like that. Okay. I'm good with that. This works for me. So we should just say this thing is sitting on the table in front of us and we've made a bunch of shows about a bunch of gadgets. Something has inspired anything like the excitement of this 1982 black and white television. I'm obsessed with this thing. Like it's so, so, so cool. It's this giant rectangle that weighs, I don't know, 400 pounds. And I just, I don't know. Do you guys like, I'm obsessed with this thing just the way that it feels. It's so tactile. And so like I feel like when I hold it, I'm in some sort of 80s movie and I'm like, it's a TV but I'm going to be yelling in it. Like it's a walkie talkie. I do want to yell into it. It begs to be held to your ear and you go like, fire him or something like that. I don't know. It just has that feeling or that you're in Stranger Things or whatnot and you're about to go fight a Demi Corgan or something like that. It just has that tactile feel. And it kind of looks like a Walkman. Like I feel like I should be able to put a, because it's got that little window where the TV part is. And it also feels like a radio because it has that tuning bit. It's just very, it's perfect. And even the typography is perfect because it's got that 80s typography feel. I haven't been able to stop playing with the little strap on the back. Like this is 100% the kickstand. It's whatever you want it to be. It's a kickstand. Wait, is it more than a kickstand? It's a strap. You can just hold it as a kickstand. Like this. Wait, this is like the OG pop socket. Yes. That's amazing. I mean, look at it. Oh, it's like a giant piece of plastic that peels off the back. This looks like the most breakable thing I've ever seen in my life. I do feel like scared when you're turning it into the kickstand mode. Like if I'm holding it like this, which you know, you're just holding it by the weakest part, do I feel confident that it's not going to crash into my laptop and destroy it? It is pretty heavy. Yeah. And like when you're pressing the kickstand into place, you're like, is it going to, it feels flimsy, feels flimsy, but it's surprisingly strong. Which is very funny because that's the only thing you would describe as flimsy on this entire device, which is otherwise like a monster slab of metal. It's like, we see a lot of things that I feel like are all sort of out of time now. Everything is just like a slab of glass. This is like from the 80s. This is like screams when it was from. And I really appreciate that. Yeah. There's like a VHS player, tape deck, radio vibe going on. Like I can immediately identify it. Totally. So to this point, actually, one of the things I was thinking about doing this research is my childhood TV. I'm too young to have like really experienced the heyday of the watchman. But I did spend a lot of time thinking about my childhood TV. Do y'all remember yours? Like when you picture like... The big boy. Yeah. The big box. The big CRT, big box that we... Is it like in a wooden cabinet? Yes. Okay. Also, like my family was crazy. We had five TVs. Everyone had to have their own personal TV. What? Yeah. Oh, you were fancy. We were not. We were not fancy. We were just crazy about certain things. Everyone had to have their own things because God forbid we have to be subjected to each other's content. So... Fair. We had our own tiny little CRT TV in my little room. My mom had hers and my dad had his and there was a big one in the basement and then there was one in the living room. Like, again, God forbid we all like come together as a family. We had her. So, we're like family movie nights in the house, like not a thing. They were not a thing. You just all watched your own movies. We watched our own stuff mainly because my dad insisted family time was watching MSNBC at dinner. Ooh. And looking at stock tickers, we were a weird family. I can see why you needed your own television. Yeah. Yeah. Like how else was I going to literally have any joy? But you had one in your room? Yeah. I had one in my room. I didn't have a TV in my room until I was like 25. Yeah. I wasn't... It was very small. Like it was... It wasn't Watchman small, but it wasn't like big. It was like maybe a 10 inch. Did it have the antenna too? It did have the antenna. Okay. Because my mom had one that fits that description. It's like same design aesthetic. Had a little kickstand on the bottom. You could run it off of an outlet or it had like... It would run on like 8D batteries. It would cost like 60 bucks to load it up with batteries. It had the antenna and she would watch Days of Our Lives while she was ironing clothes. And I can like distinctly hear the Days of Our Lives theme when I think about that piece of technology. That's awesome. Yeah. My childhood TV was like... We had a big TV or at least I remember it being big, but it was... I mean, the thing must have weighed 100 pounds. And we carried that thing around for forever. My parents' whole thing is like they like to buy the nice one, especially stuff like that and then keep it for like an unreasonably long amount of time. So like I remember this was much later obviously, but my parents bought a 32 inch Polaroid TV. Back when a 32 inch Polaroid TV cost $1,000. So this is like a nice flat screen TV a million years ago. And then they kept it for 20 years maybe, past the point where our house had been struck by lightning while the TV was on. So it would just randomly turn off all the time. And they were just like, what do you mean? We don't need a new TV. I'm just saying that the same way. So her personal CRT TV that she kept separate from my father when they split up, she brought it with her. And until she died over 20 years later, she was still using that as her main TV. Like I still have it in like her house's basement. Like we still have it. And I'm just like partly because I don't know what to do with it. It's just a giant CRT. Like what do we do? Old video games feels like the only answer. Oh yeah. And it's on like a lazy Susan because she was like, I need to turn it around. Oh my gosh. She was brilliant. Very inventive family. She used it exclusively to watch Frasier. That's it. The only thing she did was watch Frasier and the Phantom of the Opera movie, starring Jared Butler. Those are the two things she watched on it. Just exclusively incredible. That's very good. Do you remember, do either of you ever have anything like The Watchman? I mean, any like on the go, did you have one of those like flip up portable DVD players? Any of that stuff? DVD? No. I mean, I had a Walkman and have a memory of like the freedom that it allowed me, you know? I was like, oh my God, I can take my music with me and listen to whatever the hell I want, like wherever I am. And that was, I feel like, like I also missed The Watchman era, but I can relate like the feeling of like, I can take this and it's mine and nobody can take it from me. I definitely had a Walkman. The rich kid at school had one of these and it was just like, oh, staring at it and like coveting it. But like my parents going, you don't need that. You watch enough TV in your own TV, your own little room. Do people like huddle around them to watch? Yeah, people huddle. People would huddle around. But then, you know, as I got older and I was living in Japan, the feature phones in Japan had, were like TVs. So they had like little antennas that came out that you could actually watch TV from. Except, you know, I didn't have enough money for that model. That model was too fancy for poor college, Victoria. She had the basic entry level. It was blue. But it didn't have TV watching. I remember I first started covering phones. That being the thing I was like most jealous of was that a lot of phones, and I remember it lingered a really long time in Korea in particular. Yes. That they would have the broadcast antenna on the phones. And I remember being like, God, I want that so bad. And then being like, why? Yeah. I don't think that accomplishes anything in my life. But I want it so bad. I mean, you could use it on the subway. It might go in and out a little bit, but you could use it. And like my family members had the smartphones with the antenna in Korea. My uncle would be like, oh, you don't have this in America? And he's like, no. God, thanks, uncle. He burned you good. They were always like making fun of our American technology. They were like, oh, you don't have this amazing feature. I thought America was the land of the free and the rich. And I was like, Jesus Christ, uncle, Christ Almighty. I love it. So all right. So let me let's go back in history a little bit and I just want to walk you through like a little bit of the watchman history, which to your point, really kind of starts with the Walkman, which came out in 1979, which is substantially earlier than I would have guessed. Comes out in Japan like instant phenomenon and Sony starts kind of like feeling itself as a gadget maker. Meanwhile, at the time, the idea of pocket TV had been around for like 20 years at this point, which is nuts. They were all the first pocket TVs and I'm using pocket with them. Just the air quotiest air quotes of all time came in like the 60s and weighed like 15 pounds. And these were these were portable televisions. Seriously. Geez. And the problem was it was the CRTs, right? Like this was the way that they did TVs at the time required these things to be big and have lots of space to fire electrons. Like it's just big physical technology and we have not yet solved that yet. There is a research thing happening for this new technology called LCD that becomes very important very soon, but we're not quite there yet. And so all of this is happening, right? And there's the Walkman, the Game Boy is coming out around this time. And the idea is like, how do we bring more stuff with us? We weren't quite at like Gordon Gekko using the phone, which is what you hold the watchman up to your ear and you feel like Gordon Gekko using the phone on the beach. We're not quite there yet, but we are like well on our way to it. And at this point, Casio is actually the leader in large pocket televisions. They had a thing called the TV 10, which was a very early LCD. And CBS reviewed the Casio TV 10, which was basically like if you imagine sort of the layout of a digital camera, it's sort of in the in the it's horizontal. It has the screen and then some stuff off to the side. That's what all of these looked like, that you had to turn them all sideways because they needed that like depth in order to make it work. So you would you would carry it around and then you would like flip it sideways and put it on a kickstand and that's how you would use it. And I found from CBS Labs test in a thing called equipment reviews, which sure. It basically just goes through and it's like this thing is so cool. It's so small, it looks like garbage, which is the story of all of these for 20 years. It's like everybody's so amazed that these things exist at all. Like, oh, my God, I can watch TV away from my house. Never mind that as soon as it's sunny, everything falls apart and I can't see anything and the device catches on fire. There's also this company Sinclair, which is making pocket TVs that people like. And both of these companies, all the others picked like the same reason for all of these things to exist, which I find really fascinating is like watch important things in the news as they're happening. Right. And there's like, this is one of the things that really took me back because there's like this is the era of like everyone watched the evening news. Like every this was it was like a family event to like sit around the TV and watch the evening news. And that was like a crucial moment. But this is also the moment that like cable is starting to happen. Round the clock news is starting to happen. So we're at the moment of like, OK, you can actually see things in real time if you have some way to see them other than just sitting in your living room waiting for something interesting to happen on television. All these devices are also like vastly more expensive than regular people can have. So you have these huge big monster televisions, but everybody is like, there's something to this portable TV idea. Little did they know many, many, many years later, we would all have brain worms and long for the time where we just watched the news once a day. Oh my gosh. But they were imagined. I mean, yeah, that sounds kind of nice. Yeah, when the news was just 30 minutes once a day, like that's that's a world I can handle a little dose of news. Yeah. So Sony starts making this thing and it's you can sort of see, right? You go from the press man to the walk man to the watch man. Like it's a pretty easy move for them to get here. And the big there's one big innovation inside of this thing that I'm going to I will describe to you in one second. But first I want to tell you what it was almost called. It was almost called the Sony Flat TV. Oh, no. Japanese. I don't know what. So I don't know if you've ever looked up like what the Japanese Pokemon names are for the Pokemon. Oh, they're horrible. They're absolute garbage. Krabby is just called Krab. And like, you know, Charmander, very cute, very great. Right. The Japanese name is also cute. It's Hitokage, which is like little shadow or flame or whatnot. Charmillion and Charizard are lizard and lizard on. Oh, my gosh. To call it the Sony Flat TV is the most Japanese thing. It's like, ah, like that's what it is. Sony, it's flat and it TV. I am so glad they went home. This is one of the few times I'm glad that they were just like, we have existing branding. Let's let's go. This is a world in which the Walkman exists. Like this is like the best coolest gadget brand anywhere. Yeah. And they're like Flat TV. Whichever person inside Sony's marketing department was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, why don't we have branding synergy? This is the only time where I'm like, yes, I will allow synergy and branding this one time. One time. Yeah. This is the first and last good naming decision Sony ever made. Now it's just alphabet soup. So the first Watchman, this one right here in front of us is called the FD 210 because Sony couldn't help itself. You would think this was just called the Watchman because there wasn't another one. So why do you need model numbers? But alas, they're thinking big Watchman FD 210. Yeah. FD stands for, I don't know what it stands for. Flat display. Oh, my God, it probably does. It's flat display. I'm telling you, Sony, they do that with their alphabet soup. The WH, whatever thing. It's wireless headphone. That just flat display. I'm going to bet my money it's flat display. I was going to say Franklin Delano. I think flat display. They're like, we're coming for America with this one. I love it. So OK. And so there was one big technical innovation that made this thing possible. And they called it the flat display. You're right, it is FD. I hate that. They called it the flat display picture tube. And basically what it did is it took a CRT, which is I'm going to just absolutely bastardize this explanation. So bear with me. Basically, it's the way a CRT works is you have an electron gun that just shoots electrons at something, and that's how it actually takes and shows you a picture. Normally, in a TV, that thing sits behind the screen that you see. Right. And so that's the reason for the depth is like the bigger the screen, the more depth you need in order for the electron gun to hit all the areas. What Sony did was take that and turn it downwards. So instead of being like right behind the screen, it's actually below it. And you can see on the thing what the screen in there is actually curved. And so it's it's shooting up onto this curved display that is then sort of pointing the light back at you. And that's how it should see the picture. This was a super big deal because it's it's the sort of thing that like this thing is, I don't know, an inch thick and you just flat out couldn't do that before. And it is like you can sort of see if you look at it, both it's at an angle and the screen itself is sort of concave in a way that you don't really notice until you notice it. And then it's and then it's there. That's why my mom's TV was like very long. It's like the old computers like those over there. Yeah, yeah. Like big boys. Yeah, you just like you literally you need the like spray gun behind it shooting electrons out. Uh, so Sony makes that thing makes this possible. And you can actually ironically, you can still find one of those like on Alibaba. If you just want to buy one, not yourself out. Not really sure why. But there you go. Um, so but the thing that's happening is all this is happening, right, is again, else the the the villain of this story is LCD, which shows up and eventually just ruins everything. But so this watchman comes out. It first comes out in Japan, but then like six months later, ends up in the US. Do either of you know how much it costs? And if not, would you like to guess? I will accept either twenty twenty five dollars or nineteen eighty two dollars. Oh, boy. In twenty twenty five. I feel like this is all skewed, though. I'm going to say one hundred nineteen eighty two dollars. OK. I'm going to go with three hundred. There was three hundred and fifty nineteen eighty two dollars, which is a little over eleven hundred dollars today. Oh, boy. So this thing was expensive. It had a two inch CRT display. It did black and white. It was an inch and a half thick. And again, I run like the fact that it was only an inch and a half thick was like a huge part of the appeal. It weighed a pound and change, which again is both a lot and kind of not a lot. Comparatively, like truly like Allison, there's a TV behind you and like the technological gap between that and this. Yeah, is not that different and kind of game changing. Right. So all of this comes into this thing. It takes double batteries, which throwback more gadgets should take double batteries. And it had both a screen and a radio tuner and was designed to be sort of equally both of those things. A little tuning dial over here. I am so satisfied. Every single hardware detail of this is lovely. It's so sad. It has this gigantic 17 inch long antenna. It has it has two tuning dials that both feel so good. They really do. They have that like slightly sharp edge as you turn on. It feels so good. Yeah, it has the kickstand, which we love. It has a strap. Future models had a strap that was also an antenna, which is a thing that completely blew my mind. It used your body to amplify the signals on the antenna. Oh my God. Don't like that. But so, and yeah, it had a speaker. It had a place for headphones. Like it just they just kind of got this thing right. It's very impressive. It's just fat free, you know, there's not like we just shove as many features into everything. And like, if you made this today, it would be like full of Alexa things. You know, like stuff you didn't need. This just no bloatware. It just does the thing. Yeah, just does the thing. It's so perfect. But so and to the it just does the thing point, like one of the things that I think is easy to forget now is the beauty of broadcast TV was that it just it was just there. Like you just you just put up this giant ass antenna and shows appeared. Truly is gigantic. Oh, it really is. Yeah. Like this is actually a safety hazard if you're not careful, depending on where you're watching, like where you're walking deadly weapon. Oh, yeah. It bends. It's it's swivels. Yeah. So this was back at the time where like most of the things people wanted to watch were on broadcast TV and you could just have it and V is going to absolutely destroy this antenna while we're sitting here. Going to destroy the antenna. It's it's and now we are back to it. We did it out like a little guy amount, not a 17 amount. A 17 inch poke your eye out or nostril out. I'm out for the best. Yeah, you could also add an external antenna if you wanted, I guess, even more coverage that was like you could just you could do it all. Can I read you some things that happened on television in 1982 that you could have watched on your Sony Watchman? I don't know if this is going to make you feel old or young and I'm still trying to decide how it makes me feel, but we're just going to dive in. Late night with David Letterman, debuts, the weather channel goes on the air for the first 1982. Here are several shows that had their first episode in 1982. Cheers, Family Ties, Night Rider and the CBS Morning News all 1982. Big year in television. Yeah, it's like cable is like really starting to happen. So stuff is coming up, but it is still like the three main channels are still like ruling the universe. Vanna White got her job as the cohost of Wheel of Fortune in 1982. Wow. There was someone else whose name I don't remember who was the cohost before and they don't matter because Vanna White got the job. And in 1982, Drew Barrymore hosted SNL. How old do you think Drew Barrymore was when she hosted SNL in 1982? The answer is seven. Good job. Oh, I'm just on a roll today. So big year of television. And this is the kind of stuff that like all of a sudden becomes available to you. There was an iconic sports moment. The anybody who watches football knows about the catch. That was in 1982. That was the thing you could watch on your watchman. Yeah, I didn't think that was going to really work for V. No, no. But all my Dwight Clark fans out there know who they are. But so this is the point, right? Like this thing didn't require anything else. You just took it out of the box and turned it on, put in $400 worth of double batteries and you're off and running. And like, I don't know, going back and looking at this thing is just like a sort of perfectly contained experience was pretty great. Now you'd buy one of these and it would be like log into 17 apps, download a bunch of stuff, it's all going to get really complicated subscriptions. Yeah, just to watch one thing. Yeah, I guess one was just like have some television. Here you go. Have some TV. What a subtle time. Exactly. Why did we? Can we go back? We strayed from the light. We we went too close to the sun. It's true. So this thing launches, like I said, in Japan first, super popular, takes off. It was so popular in Japan, in fact, that they couldn't make enough of them to have it be readily available in the US. So it becomes a big deal in the US and people start to like freak out because they can't get one. Like there are stories about people going to Bloomingdale's to try to buy one and then they couldn't get one. So they ran down to the Sony headquarters to yell at Sony employees about the fact that they couldn't get a watch. I mean, wild. But the thing that I found so interesting about this is overwhelmingly people who used it and reviewed it, like loved it, but also thought it was bad. And it's like it's the same thing we were talking about with the older ones, right? Like you can sort of see it looking at it like, yeah, the screen sucks. And it's huge and it's heavy, but it's awesome. I love it. I I'm just thinking of like the complaints I have with heavy phones. Like a galaxy ultra. And I like I feel justified being like this is this is heavy and chunky. You know, like imagining making that complaint when around something like this. It's just totally imagine having like if you're serious about watching your TV on the go, just like the 40 double A batteries you must have in your bag along with just weighing things down. Oh my God, like the Game Boy days. Like that was a scourge of the Game Boy experience and like plugging it in whenever I could. Like we got to my grandparents house and I was like, I could plug in my Game Boy because I don't want to eat through the batteries. So I just want to show you as this thing is launching in the US, Sony made some truly spectacular slash alarming commercials about this. I love an alarming commercial. So here is an ad with a very famous person who was not yet famous at the time of making this ad. See if you can figure out who it is. You're about to see the Me TV, the Sony Watchman. It's the she TV, the Luigi TV, the first truly personal. So this is the whole pitch, right? People have in their book. They're reading it under the covers. Flat screen television just over an inch thick or is it thin and one even has an FM radio, the referee TV, the Sony Watchman TV, the one and only TV for the one and only you. Did you catch the celebrity? I did not. It was a little grainy. That is none other than Jason Alexander, our good friend, George Costanza. He has hair. Oh my gosh. That's why I didn't get it. Yeah. He has hair. That's yeah, this is this is pretty fame and hair loss. But the thing I think I love about this ad is it is so it's like a very 2025. That's like just take that thing out of being a Watchman and put smartphones in their hands and it's the same damn thing. It's just like, oh, don't go to bed. Don't like hang out with your family. Don't referee the game you're being paid to referee. Look at this instead. If you just replace the the Watchman with AI and that's like 2025. Oh, no. This is like a Gemini ad or something. Before we move on too far, I just want to we're all product reviewers. We've all written product reviews. I would like to read you a few lines from the greatest product view I've ever read in my entire life, which is by Tom Shales in a newspaper called The Record Journal from December 2nd of 1982 says Watchman, show us the night and the day and the NFL and the new twenty five thousand dollar pyramid. Actually, the twenty five thousand dollar pyramid looks like a twenty five cent pyramid on the new Sony Watchman. But who cares? That's very good. That's a good one. Oh my gosh. Genuine, genuine kudos to them for that. The Watchman is as cute as E.T. And you don't have to wait in the woodshed for one to come and visit you. I don't know what that means. Well, I don't think that's anything. So intense on a TV this small, any series is a mini series. That was my favorite. Oh, that was very good. I liked that a lot. Yeah, that was that was well played by him. The set runs for two and a half hours on four little batteries or can be operated from a wall plug or larger batteries for longer playing time. And I'm like, Tom, what's your what? What am I supposed to make of this? Do more batteries, bigger batteries? Who cares? Have some batteries. What do you want? Oh, no. You didn't add it or there. Yeah, Tom Tom Shales. He said the whole screen could be hidden by a single commemorative postage stamp. Which I suppose is postage. This is what I've been wondering. That's a little harsh. Yeah, but even even our buddy Tom Shales, the greatest product reviewer of all time. He said at the end of this, he said the same thing. Everybody says, which is this thing is awesome. I love it to pieces. It's not the thing. And he, along with everybody else, was already talking about, oh, LCD is going to make this stuff work, because LCD, it was like it was a science project. It was really complicated. It was really expensive, but it made the whole display stack like so, so, so much smaller and it was very clear to everybody that like this thing is a good idea. But it won't have to be this big for very long. And so this is just this is such an interesting example of the kind of gadget that is like doomed from the day it starts. Yeah, but that kind of doesn't kill its appeal. Uh-huh. Like Sony did everything right. And this thing always had like a teeny tiny shelf life. Yeah, there's sort of a unique moment in time. There's not like a thing that could come before it really. And there's not a direct thing to replace it. It feels like just so of its moment. Totally. I love it. Totally. All right, so we need to take a break. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the legacy of the Watchman and how it changed us all forever. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So a thing that I discovered about the Watchman is that it became like a weirdly great giveaway. This is like so I was just searching around thinking and seeing like, OK, where was this thing sort of coming up in pop culture? And over and over, it was like, oh, I got one from the company Raffle. Or like if you sign up for there was one that was like sign up for a mortgage on this Florida Beach house and you'll get a free Watchman from the real estate company. And I think to me, it like really speaks to what this thing actually was. It's like no one needed this, but it's awesome. And if you have one, kick ass. And like let me just play you a few of the things that this became thrown into because they're very fine. A free Sony Watchman TV with every new superior Ford car, truck or van. But you've got to buy now because this offer is good only during the sale of ration and only as superior Ford in Zachary. Welcome to the General Bells Watch and Play Game. In the next 60 seconds, we'll tell you if you've won the Sony Watchman TV. You can win it right here right now. Got to watch and play game card. You can find watch and play game card. I didn't think. Here you go. Go pass. Watchman TV giveaway box 9602 Clinton, Iowa. We'll include a list of winning pictures. Millions went or a thousand win. I honestly think submitting things to PO boxes to try and win contests is the single most nostalgic thing I can think of. Oh, my gosh. I won. I won. Thousands will win. All right. That's their government mandated disclaimer. I won a Sprite logo basketball. Yeah. What did you? One from like the bottle top of a of a Sprite bottle. Did you have to mail it in? I did. That's awesome. And I got basketball. See, that was the first step. Yeah. Actually mailing it in. I never got that far. You didn't get your basketball? No. They were counting on you not doing that. I was so excited that I won. Allison was vigilant. I mean, maybe I would have done it for a Sony Watchman. Yeah. I mean, like that's like a perfect giveaway thing because it's not going to cost too much to have for like a corporation, but it's just expensive enough for like a normal person that you're like, I'd love it as a gift. I want to pay my own money for it. Yeah. Like it's perfect. You're already buying a car. Why not get a Watchman with it? Yeah, or buying a house. Yeah, it's so good. Safety hazard. You're buying because like ostensibly, like the referee not paying attention to the game, you're going to be driving and not paying attention to the rules of the road in your Bronco, just watching your tiny little screen. I mean, yes, but no. I'm good with it personally. I mean, and the thing I have enjoyed the most about this was going back and seeing all of the stories about how people were using theirs. Like over and over and over, there are like people who are complaining or writing about or submitting questions to newspapers, being like, my husband won't stop watching the football game on his Watchman in church. And he's just like bent over in the pew with presumably headphones on and 17 inch antenna and just watching TV. And this is the sort of thing that again, like it's kind of commonplace now. Like everybody's on their phone everywhere all the time. But this thing is enormous and new. And so it was like it was you were not inconspicuous when you were doing something like this and people just didn't care. They just did it anyway. So our news writer, Andrew Lushevsky told me he had one. He had a Sony Watchman and he was addicted to it. And he whipped it out at a funeral. Wow. As a kid. So I'm shaming Andrew, but like that's that's amazing. Just whipping out the the Sony Watchman at a funeral in the 80s or like whenever he had his that's that's pretty amazing. He also said that he would use like the sound only function so that when he was at a baseball game, he could actually hear the commentary. So like that. Another classic dad move. That's a classic classic sport ball. Yeah. Was he keeping score too with all the little. I don't know. I did that with air about sports enough to dive deeper into that. But I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. I guess you can't listen to the pundits say the thing about the ball sport. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it's called. Yeah. The ball sport. Yeah. People say that. Yeah. But no, and I think what's wild about that to me is like everybody just started doing it. Do you know what I mean? It's not like there wasn't like a slow period of figuring out where these things are and are not socially acceptable. People were just like, oh, I have a TV. Sick. I'm going to watch this TV. And they're like, where are you in the like, I don't know. It doesn't matter. I'm going to watch this TV. And it just it just like happened. And one of the things I thought was really interesting about all of this is there had been from the beginning of the Walkman, there were a lot of people who were like really up in arms about the existence of this thing. They're like, it's isolating people. They're wearing headphones. They're not interacting in the real world. How am I supposed to know who's here? You know, stuff that we're very familiar with now, but it was this, there are all these questions about like sort of individualism versus isolation. Is this big, messy spectrum? And the Watchman just took that to a whole other level because at least with the Walkman, you like dancing down the street and flowy clothing. But you at least like have your head up probably. The Watchman is just like you just immediately are subsumed into your own world. Like we've seen these ads, the whole point is to take you completely away from whatever you're doing and just immerse you in this space. And it's like, it's just very funny to think 43 years later, we have not solved any of that. I feel like there's kind of a moment with new technologies like that, especially like the mobile technologies and of varying degrees of like, is this OK? Everybody is watching their Sony Watchman at funerals or whatever. It is a choice to sit in a public place and just be like, let me just put this 17 inch. We can't emphasize enough. It's 17 inches. Yeah, that's that's it's a whole ruler. And then just and it's so small and my eyes are so bad. If I was watching this, I'd have to be like two inches in front of me just to see what it's on. That can you imagine trying to watch a telenovela or anything with like a subtitle? No, it's not happening. There's no. I still love it. Again, like so much of this, I think was just that it was novel. And it was like, it was just so cool that you could do it. Like, I don't know. Do you guys ever go back and watch like TV from this era? And you're like, oh, this all looks like crap. How did anyone see anything on television? Imagine that. But it two inches. Yeah, right. Might have made things better. Like fuzzy it a little bit. It's kind of true. So but anyway, so this thing like both sort of sets off this like weird cultural firestorm that we're still dealing with now, but also continues to become a huge hit. One of the things I was reading suggested that so Sony after the Walkman had become really popular, what might have been one of the reasons that it bought CBS records for two billion dollars in part to just like have stuff to put on the Walkman. And there's there's also a real argument to be made that Sony bought Columbia pictures just to have stuff to put on the Watchman, that there was like honest to God, like there was a future in which this thing was like the iPod. Like Sony Watchman 50 is like the video iPod was like sort of how they were thinking about this, which I think is super fascinating. That's so Sony. And then the one after this, the the FD 20, because what would come after the FD 210 but the FD 20? Thank you, Sony added video input to this. So you could just use it as a screen, but put something else into it. And so this thing is just like starts to become more and more successful over time. A few models later, it got color. It a few models after that, I think, was when it got a whole new design. And it kind of looked like a, I don't know, radar gun that was not into it. But then eventually it becomes full on LCD, much smaller, much simpler, like the thing you would sort of expect it to be. But then everything inspires to kill the Watchman. And sort of two things happen simultaneously. One is that a bunch of other devices start to exist. So by now it's like the late 90s. And basically Sony spends like 15 years, I think they made 65 different Watchmen. That's a lot of Watchmen. It's a lot of Watchmen. There was an army of Watchmen. Watchmans. The Watchmans. No, no, no, it's Watchmen. The Watchman. And so they eventually like it becomes for a bunch of reasons, sort of price and availability on this stuff, it becomes like not quite Walkman level mainstream, but like lots of people have them. But then again, immediately LCD makes that turn. And Sony is actually late to the turn to LCD because it had the CRT thing that it was really excited about. So it was slow to make that change. Others came along. But then again, by the end of the, by like the late 90s, we're starting to get to like portable DVD players and we're starting to get to all kinds of other ways to consume stuff in a mobile way. But then the thing that truly killed it was that in the US in particular, we switched from analog TV signals to digital TV signals, which literally all at once destroyed the Watchman. It just had nothing to watch anymore, which is very sad. That's true. That process took a long time and it was super messy. And there are a lot of people who still have a lot of feelings about it. I mean, if you turn it on now, it just took place static and that just feels so emblematic and sad at the same time. But it still works. It would still work. I know. And so what's wild is that, that was the end. Like very rarely do you get a moment where something just instantly ceases to be a thing that anyone needs or cares about. But it's like as soon as they switch the signals, it's dead. It was gone. It's like you can boot up an old family computer or something and there's still remnants of like whatever was on there and some software that is, you know, outdated and a security risk. But like, yeah, there's it's just blank. Like the content stream does not exist in any way anymore. Yeah. All right. We need to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to do the eight version history questions. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So on every episode, we answer the same eight questions about whatever product we're talking about. Question number one, what was the very best thing about the Watchman? Clearly the 17 inch antenna. Yeah. Clearly that. No, I think, um, that's so hard. Like the problem, like the thing about these version history questions is I couldn't list like a whole thing about what the worst thing is, but trying to figure and like distill the best thing. Uh, so what I had as my best thing is now after a conversation, what I think might be the worst thing is that it made TV portable. You know, it's like. I don't know what it is about making your music private and portable. That just feels immensely positive that you would think would apply to the TV portion of it and it's like, yeah, cool. Awesome. Uh, very handy for dads at baseball games. But, um, now I'm just like, is that the best thing? Is that the best thing? I think maybe now my revised best thing is just how much of like a tactile gadget it is. Yeah. That's kind of mine too. Yeah. The dials, like it just really brings me back into, you see the like little indicator move up and down the window when you're tuning it. It, yeah, everything just, just takes me back to using a gadget of this era. And it's all like within reach of your thumb, kind of. Like you're watching your walkie-talkie. Yeah, yeah, you could. It's like, yeah, I mean, there you go. I actually didn't expect that to work, but you can hold it in your right hand and turn all the wheels. I'm, I'm going to have wrist pain. It is one pound. It is well considered, I think. I think my answer is just the, the all in oneness of it. I think is really awesome. Like if you look at something like this now, I see at least two things on here that would be separate accessories, right? There's the kickstand, which definitely would not come as part of it. The antenna would probably be something separate. But it would have, you know, the, it would not be AA batteries, which I love AA batteries. But there's just something about like, you could take this thing out of the box, put in the batteries and turn it on and it would be instantly feature complete. I think it's like very cool. Oh man. We just got a PS5 because we're on the cutting edge of technology. But like the hoops you have to jump through to start up a new console. It was a whole evening. You're like set aside a whole evening before you plan on playing any of your games. This is just like it, it's ready to go. Yeah, totally. All right. Question number two, what was the worst thing about it? Clearly the 17 inch antenna. You know, I think the fact that it would probably just not be very practical. It's eating through the battery life. Like on the one hand AA batteries, on the other hand AA batteries. And then also I think a thing that doesn't get talked about is just how finicky tuning can be. Because like it's so satisfying now, but if we were trying to like, like do you remember trying to tune into the right station on like your radios? Boy, especially this is on the go. This is like a thing you are like actively out in the world moving around with. That's the whole point of its existence. Trying to dial that in all the time, I think would probably drive me insane. There's a, I listen to the radio in my car a lot. And there's kind of a dead zone on my route to pick up my kid at daycare. And it's at a stoplight. And I'm always listening to like KEXP and I'll like inch the car forward. Try and get in the right spot where I'm picking it, where there's not static anymore. Yeah. With that plus a visual would be very frustrating. Yeah, agreed. I think for me, it's got to be the screen like legit kudos for your technological accomplishments, Sony, but the screen sucks. Yeah. And it is kind of, it's like a little bit of a you had one job situation. You know what I mean? Like it's like, oh, we made a Walkman. It's so neat, but the sound is awful. It's like, well, is it that good a Walkman? Yeah, I just, I'm so like so universally the reviews were like, I love this thing so much. It's so terrible. And that's genuinely how I feel about it. Question number three, would it have been a bigger hit is Apple made it? At least not at the time, I think. Like are we talking 1980s Apple? Yes. 1982 Apple is like Apple to era Apple. And I don't think it had the chops to this. No, like Apple wasn't even thinking mobile back then. And then if you think about just how many competitors there were in this space, because you're like what mentioned in Casio's and the game Panasonic, I think is in the game, Sinclair is in the game. And then if you really think about it, Sony in the 80s, peak bubble era Japan, Sony was like, this is the height of my power. I have not yet Sonyed myself into oblivion. This is a good point. Like we probably should have made more of this at the beginning. Like Sony truly is like crushing it in the early 80s. Like everything it's doing is working. It is like at the center of culture. I think especially in Japan, obviously it is like the biggest thing going. But even as it comes to its side, like people saw Sony then the way people see Apple now. So like if you were to ask this question in the 80s, it would be like is it a bigger hit if Sony made it? Like that's how meaningful a thing Sony was then. All right. Question number four, if you could go back and make this thing yourself, what would you do differently? You're in charge of the Watchman division in 1982. Are you changing the name back to flat TV? Is that the move? I feel like that the environmentally sound thing would be to make it like encourage you to run it off of the off of wall power and not eat a bunch of AA batteries. Like I don't know. Split the difference, swappable battery packs. Yeah, yeah. So then like when you're at home, you charge the battery packs. Right. And then you just have the swappable battery packs. I think I would just try to make it cheaper. Even like a little bit cheaper. And I think you can kind of corner the market in a pretty big way. Because if you think about it, like the Walkman lasted so long. Yeah. And I think the Watchman was on this sort of death march towards LCDs from the very beginning. But I think if you like really invest in, you're like, we're going to make it as culturally big and cool and exciting. So that like a generation of people who never used one has like attachments to it. I think you could have done it. And I think you just try to drive the price down a little. If I'm Sony, I go into crime and I make sure that everyone stays on analog. And then I make a digital tuning adapter. There you go. There you go. Okay. So we're going to corrupt governments around the world. Corrupt government. For my own ends. Yeah. I mean, they bought Columbia Pictures probably for the Watchman, right? So why, see they went too big. They were like, we're going to get into the money guzzler that is Hollywood. We should have just made it so that everyone stayed on analog forever. Yeah. I don't know why they got that accent all of a sudden. But yeah. Yeah, they're doing a very like mid-Atlantic accent on that one. I like it. All right. Question number five. What feature of this thing should every current version have? And I'm going to tweak this slightly because there are no current Watchman. You have to take something from this device in front of us and put it on smartphones. Kickstand. That's what I was going to say too. Yeah. That's why I said it fast. They get it in there. As a person who will never stop having a pop socket on the back of my phone. I look at that kickstand and I'm like, they, Sony gets it. You guys are doing it right. So kickstand is the appropriate answer. The one in my heart is the 17-inch antenna. Oh my gosh. I love it. Just as like a carrying mechanism. Just as a carrying mechanism. Just sort of dangling at your side. You know, you put the 17-inch antenna, fight off people on the street who are bothering you, poke out your eye, instant get out of work free card. I'm sorry guys, poked my nose out. No. Taser situation. When I have to point to my husband at the thing he didn't actually put away, you just tap it with the antenna and go tap, tap, tap, tap. You've just suggested the possibility of a whole new app store just for the antenna on your iPhone. There we go. And I'm now very intrigued by this idea. Yeah. This is a free idea. I will consult someone in the third party accessory market. So you get 30%. You heard it here first. Yeah, 30%. I'll live with 30%. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I do love an antenna. I just like, phones need more things to fiddle with. I don't think it needs an antenna, but like my other option, if it wasn't the kickstand, was going to be the tuners. Just because I'm like, there's just something about like, stop it with the volume buttons that suck to press and give me a thing I can spin with my finger. Yeah. Just give it to me. As Joni I've said, the digital crown is the input of the... Honestly, if Joni I've had gotten up at the intro of the Apple Watch and been like, this does nothing, but it's fun as hell to fiddle with, I would have been like, yes, Joni. You get it, Joni. To be fair, scroll knobs on mechanical keyboard, it's a digital crown. And bring back scrolly thingies. I don't know. More scrolly thingies. More scrolly thingies. I'm into that. Question number six, is there an alternate timeline in which this thing was more or even more successful? I think the answer to this one is clearly yes. Do you think if there's the cheaper one? I think if Joni waited a few years and did this first, made like a huge splash with the LCD Sony Walkman and tried to be early to that instead of very late to this, I think it could have worked. Because the thing is with something like this, you just can't make that bet at the time because you just don't know how long it's going to take to commercialize. You don't know when it's going to happen. Like I get why you ship this thing when you do. But knowing what we know now, if I'm Sony, I just ride the Walkman out for a while, add some more features to it. It keeps being a thing and then it's like late 80s, watchman, what's up losers. Like I feel like it wins. And then it dies immediately when the... I don't know if it died. I know there's that. But conceptually, they were so spot on because everything that they pitched as an idea we are currently doing now. Yeah. So I do think... I've been watching sports the whole time we've been doing this. I mean, honestly, my fictional alternate timeline where Sony gets a mid-Atlantic accent and goes, hey, see, folks here, we're going to get the analog. We're going to own the analog and nothing goes digital ever. Then they win. Yeah. Yeah. I like this. This is the smartphone of that era. I mean, you're honestly kind of right. Yeah. Which brings us to question number seven. Could you reboot it now? I don't know. I mean, do we have to assume you can do some kind of digital antenna situation with it? I mean... You can reboot it however you want. Okay. I would like to make the case that not only could you reboot this now, Netflix should be working on this already. I would agree with you on that for sure because I think in Korea, they still have phones that do TV like this. Oh, man. I still think that they actually, they definitely do because when the coup d'etat was happening back in December, people were taking their old Galaxy phones that could do this. Oh, wow. And they were using it because what happened, YouTube wasn't working. Streaming wasn't working. Cell phones weren't working. So all the TV signals were working. They just needed to update. Like they have like this different standard there. I think it's called like DBM, DMB or something like that. So, you know, as soon as December 2024, people were actually having a need for this. So also if we're in some sort of apocalyptic zombie last of us era, I think this comes back. Sure. I think this comes back. I think a lot of things come back. But I think, so to me, the idea of a dedicated shows and movie device is actually very compelling. I have found myself over and over recently sitting down to watch a show that I want to watch. And I'm like, I'm so excited to watch this. I've been waiting all week to watch it. And then I just screw around on my phone the whole time. And I'm like, this is dumb. Like why am I doing this? And then now when I open up my phone, there is the simplest place to go is like social media or Reddit or something like that. And so for me, it's like the idea of actually having something that is just essentially an iPod video again. Actually makes a lot of sense to me. Like a Kindle, but for TV. Yeah. But I want it to come from a streaming service. And it probably has to be Netflix because I just want the whole damn library. Just either locally on the device or just always they're available for me. And it's just like, maybe it's the answer to this probably ends up being like the foldable iPhone that turns into like a larger phone or any foldable gadget now. But like there is something to a dedicated portable television that I like honestly think I want back in my life. Yeah. I want it. I don't want notifications while I'm watching TV. No, I know. I don't. But I want to go even farther down that road and I want it to play only PBS and not just PBS. I want the like cozy PBS shows like America's Test Kitchen, Bob Ross, the like sewing shows or whatever. Rick Steves. I think that would I would carry that around. Okay. Wait, we figured this out. Yeah. So you buy it and when you buy it, you pick like a handful of what amount to like fast channels. Yeah. So it's just like always on playing whatever you want. So for me, it's like one of mine is going to be like a 24 seven stream of the office. That's just like on the on the tuner. I can just tune to the office and you pick like, I don't know. There are there are like 12 stations on here. So you pick 12 channels and that's what you have. And this just is like your, your never ending TV machine. Yeah. And you can never change it. Right. Because that's great also because you know, it's the problem with TikTok is that you constantly have to scroll. You have to interact with it. If it's just like a thing where you're tuning in and you don't have to do that. Oh, that's great. And this solves the you turn it on and it immediately starts playing. Yeah. Right. Which I like very much. All right, we solved it. We did it. Okay. And we're going to call it the flat TV. It's going to be sick. FD 210. FD, we're going to call it the FD 110. Because so does get right past that for something. Well, undercut them. Yeah. All right. Question number eight. Does this belong in the version history Hall of Fame? I think yes. It's a perfect gadget. It doesn't matter that it's big and bulky and it chewed through AA batteries and it doesn't work anymore. It's perfect. I also think yes, just because conceptually like just this whole time we've been talking about how everything it does was like a precursor to our current health state and reality. So like if you're talking about like version history, we have a lot of RIP gadgets that never made it. But like if you're talking about impact and thoughts and like concepts, I actually think this is pretty like holy guacamole. This is this is this is just my phone, but like make it retro and analog and steampunk. This is a steampunk smartphone. Okay. Let me make the case against. Which is that I think what you both said is true, but I don't think this device did it. Do you know what I mean? Like I think it was right about a lot of things, but I don't think it caused those things. If that makes sense. Like I don't I actually don't think you can draw a you can draw a sort of straight cultural line from there to here, but I don't think this sort of begets the smartphone in any sort of straight way. I will allow it if you at a future date and time put the Walkman in because I think the Walkman may be the actual like precursor. Or we go all the way back and it's the Pressman. And then we go back to the Pressman. Sony's tape recorder division gets the one that deserves. Like if we think about like what Sony did with the Pressman and then the Walkman and then the Watchman like that like line of thinking and just like the cultural impact of having personal devices where we isolate ourselves into a constant content streaming hell and don't remember to look up and talk to other people. And yeah, this is definitely like an evolution in there. But if you're talking about like the iconic thing in that timeline, then I think it would be the Walkman. That's fair. So I tend to agree. I will say the Watchman did end up on time's list of the all time 100 gadgets. Yeah. Which I thought was kind of wild. What year? What year? This was in 2010. And I mean again, with a black and white screen smaller than most current cell phone display is the Watchman isn't much by today's standards. But when it was released in 1982, it was a marvel. Again, I love it and it sucks. Like over and over and over and over. That's just what they say. I think it's no. I think you're right that if you're going to point to a thing that changed everything, it has to be the Walkman. Because this comes only because of the Walkman. That and like the one thing I'll put in its favor is that it's kind of popularizing. It may not be the number one thing that did it, but it is just like pushing this idea of screens everywhere. Yeah. Because honestly, maybe you stay out of the version Hall of Fame because you created a dystopian hill. Yeah, right. Like you're kind of rewarding that behavior. Where you have screens everywhere. Like I love it. It's the perfect gadget. There's just so much about its boxiness and 80s-ness that like brings so much joy. But then I think about my life right now and how TikTok is my hell and I doom scroll and we have the word doom scroll. No, you don't deserve to be in the version Hall of Fame. You can think about that. That is a lot to put on the Watchman. The Watchman is just here doing its best. No. Okay, I'm sorry. You have a 17 inch. Pretty high. Don't put that on the flat TV. Yeah, flat TV. Okay, okay. You know what? Poor flat TV. Let's put it on Sony. We'll put it on Sony. You can't choose who your parents are. It's true. Yeah, but for now, I think it stays out. But it's like an honorable mention. Okay, honorable mention. It got votes during the ceremony. But it didn't quite make it in. You know, maybe if there's like a conceptual Hall of Fame or almost famous. The almost Hall of Fame. The almost famous is pretty good. The almost famous. The almost Hall of Fame. I'm just inventing new wings for your Hall of Fame. The version history Hall of Fame is going to be a very complicated compound. It's going to be a huge compound with different wings. This will be in the Southwest wing. I've decided. Okay. Yeah. There it is. Done and done. All right. That is it for the show. Thank you both for doing this. Thank you as always for being here with us. As ever, you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube. You can listen to them wherever you get podcasts. And the best way to support all of us and all of this is to subscribe to Virg.com. Thank you again. See you next time. Version history is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Eric Gomez, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Studio support from Chris Schertleff. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to subscribe to the new version history podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive.