The Sony Watchman was must-see TV

To understand the Sony Watchman, you have to go back. Way back. Back to when “TV” wasn’t just a way to refer to any piece of content between 20 and 89 minutes, available on every screen everywhere for a few bucks a month. In 1982, when Sony first started selling its new device, “TV” was a piece of furniture. It was probably humungous, and often made largely of wood. Sony helped change all that.

For this episode of Version History, we take on the whole story of the Watchman. David Pierce, Allison Johnson, and Victoria Song start with the story of the Walkman (though that’s another episode in itself), which was for all intents and purposes the first truly mainstream, truly portable music player. Walking down the street listening to music was a cultural revolution, and made Sony an even more important gadget maker.

The Watchman wasn’t the first portable TV — news junkies around the world had devices from Casio, Sinclair, and others that were aimed at “keeping you in the know while you’re on the go” — but it had a couple of clever upgrades over the competition. The most important was the Flat Display Picture Tube, which took traditional CRT display technology and twisted it into a much smaller shape. It still required a pretty big pocket, but you could successfully hide the thing in a church pew or a business meeting. And thanks to the ongoing boon in broadcast TV, there was always something to watch. And so people did.

Ultimately, the Watchman lasted almost two decades, but you know how the story ended. Nobody owns a “portable TV” anymore, and in fact Sony lost the race long before the smartphone came along. But in its heyday, Sony’s handheld screen was a big deal. It also raised questions about social isolation and what would happen when we filled the world with screens, the likes of which we’re still grappling with today. For better and for worse, the world never went back.

This is the third episode of Version History. (The first two were about hoverboards and BBM). If you want to find the show, there are three good places to go:

Thanks to everyone who has already watched or listened to the show, and has sent feedback! We’re already hard at work on the next bunch of episodes, and want to hear everything you think we should be doing or not doing or doing differently. Seriously, please tell us how to decide what makes the Hall of Fame. In the meantime, if you want to dive into the Watchman as deep as we did, here are some links to get you started: