Seriously? A hundred bucks for a fucking Walkman? Assuming you can find one, they're what, now? (also - inflation. just double whatever's on screen and that's more or less what it would cost in 2008 bucks)
In the early 90s people wanted to make their own mixes before CDR and Minidisc were around. People paid �100 upwards for stunning Walkmen at this point. On eBay some still go for up to �200.
The level of engineering, sir, blows away what we have today. The nice models of the early 80s would have cost 0 and sounded like home tape decks. Compared to the drugstore personal stereos most people remember from the cassette era, they're like putting an iPod next to a generic Chinese knock-off. Except iPods break all the time and are only superficially impressive.
Sure, let's laugh about it now. Let's act all high and mighty about how primitive technology was back then. That laughter will be echoed when your grandchildren laugh at your iPods. It's not like they'll respect you after your reaction to their robot spouse.
I dunno, it's not like the iPod didn't steal its design from early transistor radios. All that will probably change is that our players will be permanently online and have a million features.
All hail whatever the iPhone evolves into, I guess. I mean, Nokia already allow you to stream music free of charge and i'ts like an extra �5pm to upgrade pretty much any cellphone contract to allow streaming from your home computer - the future is here.
This is why it's important that we drain the planet's resources during this generation, so our grandchildren can only dream of their ancestors' fabled iPods while running away from FUCKING RADSCORPIONS.