Little jewels that have fallen into the dark past

There are some things I have purchased in the past that are just too cool for me to give or throw away - even though today's technology has rendered them useless (sigh). I came across one of them the other day when doing an inventory of cool-things-that-are-now-worthless in my top drawer. It seems that my top drawer is full of little items like that, and I hadn't gotten too deeply into it when I came across one of the last of the Sony Walkman(s). (Walkmen?)

This little jewel probably dates back to the mid nineties or so. I couldn't find any real information on it, but I suspect it was one of the last models to be introduced before digital music completely rendered it useless. The engineers at Sony must have been given the mandate to produce a Walkman cassette player that would be barely bigger than the tape cassette itself. After what must have cost those engineers a lot of late nights in the Sony development lab, they completely succeeded. The "Radio Cassette Player WM-F701C" that I pulled out of the depths of my top drawer is almost a miracle of miniaturization. I'd actually call it a miracle except that the MP3 players that came along a few years later were truly miraculous. They could pack every album I ever owned into something the size of half a graham cracker. That's what killed off the WM-F701C. It could only play those small audio cassettes one at a time. You still had to carry a pocket full of them with you on a trip.

In spite of that, the WM-F701C was and is a miniature wonder. Just take a look at the photograph below. Look at how beautifully they crammed all those rollers, guides and springs into that exceedingly small space. It's all the more remarkable when you consider that the vast majority of space inside the WM-F701C had to be reserved for the tape reels of the cassette. To my eyes, it's a piece of engineering beauty, and mine is in perfect shape. Just one very small dent on the back where I must have dropped it one day on my way to work.

As soon as I found it, I rushed out to my sun room where I keep my extensive collection of vinyl records to see if I could dig up a cassette. I found a good one, plugged in a fresh battery, and snapped in my cassette. The result -- nothing. For as beautiful a piece of engineering the WM-F701C is, it has one major weakness: all the moving parts are powered by a little belt, and the little belt had spent all those years in my top drawer slowly deteriorating.

I thought about trying to take it apart and searching for a belt on the Internet, but really. All my cassettes are available as digital files, and with my new smart phone containing nearly every song I would ever want to listen to, I don't even carry around a dedicated MP3 player any longer. So, the little WM-F701C has been relegated to a pile of other past electronic miracles that don't actually work either. There's a small (for its day) Kodak Instamatic camera, one of the very first transistor radios that is in unused condition and even contains a nice little schematic. But, I do take them down and look at them once in a while.