"The harness system keeps the padded pack securely in place on your chest."

Before the Sony Walkman and long before the iPod, the Astraltune was a personal music system, which was marketed to skiers who wanted some tunes on the slopes. It was the very first portable stereo cassette player, but the company somehow never patented the invention. The Finest Daily includes the Astraltune in a new list of firsts from the annals of gadgetry. (Thanks to justabuzz.) An excerpt:

“Most people think Sony’s Walkman paved the way to hearing loss for a generation of teenagers, but the original portable music player actually pre-dated the Walkman by almost five years. The Astraltune Stereopack debuted in Reno, Nevada in 1975 and it was aimed at freestyle skiers who wanted to groove out to their favorite tunes while hitting the slopes. It was a bulky 3-pound unit worn in a sack mounted on the chest, but it was the first time you had a power source, a cassette player and a headphone output in the same unit. The story doesn’t have a happy end though – the inventor(s) never patented their invention and today very few people remember it; Sony went on to dominate the personal stereo market for well over 15 years.”