This is the end of the road for the original Sony Walkman Cassette Player.  Interest for the pioneer device that helped usher in the age of portable CD players, MP3 players and other media-playing portables has died.  Apparently, there are still people out there making mix tapes. Who knew?

The boxy, iconic gadget will no longer be manufactured by Sony.  Up to this point, The Walkman Cassette Player was still being produced in some Japanese markets for die-hard fans.  

A batch made in April is said to be the last of the line but according to some reports, the cassette player will continue to be outsourced by Sony, for a limited time to a Chinese manufacturing company as the product is phased out and eliminated completely.

The world's first portable media device was launched in 1979 as the TPS-L2. For more than 30 years, the Sony Walkman Cassette player has sold over 220 million devices but lost it's edge in the '90s before its re-introduction into the digital world.

While the Sony Walkman Cassette Player is being boxed, the Sony Walkman brand will still be made available in the form of MP3 players and Walkman mobile phones as well as CD and mini-disc players.

Trademarked in 1963 by the Philips Corporation, the "compact cassette" was marketed by the company in 1965. Philips made the product available free of charge to Sony and other manufacturers the world over, but the compact cassette was initially developed as a speech-only, portable dictation machine.  It wasn't meant to be a replacement for reel-to-reel recorders.