My First iPOD

So I bought my first iPOD in early December, it’s the Touch model.
Now I have to say I had this idea years ago. Specifically I remember purchasing my first cassette recorder in 1974 – I remember this because the salesman left Elton Johns Caribou tape in the machine. At the time I was also playing around with broken 8-track machine and the chunkiness of the mechanics and fragileness of the tape led me to proclaim “someday the voice and music recorded on these types of tape recorders will be contained on a integrated circuit”.

That obviously happened in the late 90’s [Apples version debuting in October of 2001] fueled by compression technology from the 80’s and…. the grand daddy of all that created the breakout demand, peer-to-peer file sharing.

Timeline - History of MP3

• 1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB)
• 1988 - January - Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.
• 1989 - April - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3.
• 1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was integrated into MPEG-1.
• 1993 - MPEG-1 standard published.
• 1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later. 1996 November 26, - United States patent issued for MP3.
• 1998 - September - Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer.
• 1999 - February - A record company called SubPop is the first to distribute music tracks in the MP3 format.
• 1999 - Portable MP3 players appear.
  

I knew that Naspter existed and that free music what just a high speed connection away. I did look at the players “of the day” and was considering the Intel pocket Concert for $499.99. My idea of what they should look like was greatly different from the little boxes they were selling at the time. I think the market place was happy to have a sold state walkman.

As I looked at the players available in the late 90’s I wondered why they couldn’t be all screen with touch sensitive buttons - just like the control panels in Star Trek the Next Generation.