My First Gadget-love

Since 1995, my mum had been going to the UK every year for her Ph. D. in theology. Sam (my bro) and I used to joke around saying that mum had to be told exactly what to buy, but when Dad had gone to the UK in 1988 and Holland in 1992, he just bought stuff - which we both liked straight away. This being the case, my first gadget love was a device Mum bought from the UK. True, Sam helped me scour several pages and pages of the Sony UK website (remember, these were the days of dial-up and www.yahoo.com and VSNL Shell (text-only) Internet connections) and find the exact product I liked - a Sony Walkman WM EX674. It was the costliest walkman at the Sony UK website, retailing for 40 GBP at that time. My mum had to visit plenty of shops before she could find one - apparently, they were discontinued in the UK brick-and-mortar retail stores. She finally did get one - it cost her 78 GBP or something - a whopping expense, considering our family finances. This walkman became my love - I actually took it to school to show it off to a couple friends (Ajay and Santosh). During an intense session of self-examination before our Lord, I was deliberating if I should pick my walkman or my bible as the one thing to pull out of my home in the event of a fire (Hey - bibles can be replaced easily!). This walkman brought sheer awesomeness into my life - at a time when people around me had clunky, bulky walkmans with push buttons, mine was sleek, slim, had electronic buttons, could rewind/forward/skip/repeat songs (on a tape!), had a rectangular rechargeable battery, an external battery pack for a AA battery and was bathed with a metallic blue colour in a matte finish. It provided me hours and hours and hours of company during my days and nights in school and college. It provided hours and hours of entertainment to my friends and my room-mates in college as well. Sadly, when a computer came into my hostel room, the walkman lost its importance. It started being relegated to journeys and travels. I was still using it when I first came to Bangalore in 2006. It lost out soon to the sheer volume of MP3s that a PC can hold. I still have this Walkman. Haven't got the heart to sell it or give it away. It's the most emotion-attached gadget I've owned. Thanks, Mum.

Interested folk can check out the below links for few photos of this lovely device.
http://cdn.kalaydo.de/mmo/9/225/027/59_-142415234.jpg
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/7469/dsc07076n.jpg
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/35/dsc07074c.jpg/
http://n2.vatera.hu/photos/f2/3d/cb75_2_big.jpg