It's amazing how quickly pieces of technology can become not only an accepted, but also indispensable parts of everyday life. It's hard to believe, but the MP3 player, now more accurately called the Digital Audio Player (DAP) or Personal Media Player (PMP), is 10 years old. Of course, most people just call it the iPod, but that's a whole other story.
It was back in March of 1998 that the world first
got a glimpse of the MPMan F10 at the CeBit tech trade show in Hanover, Germany. The prototype garnered enough attention that, by May of that year, the Korean company Saehan Information Systems was mass producing the devices. By summer of 1998, the 32-megabyte (MB) flash device was on sale in the U.S. for $250.
At 3.6 x 2.75 x 6.5-inches, the MPMan was significantly larger than any media player on the market right now, save some of the largest wide screen video players. The Walkman-sized-device could only hold a small handful of songs, and its display was only slightly fancier than your standard digital alarm clock.
By now, of course, Saehan Information Systems and its MPMan are all but forgotten. In fact, many mistakenly point to the
Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300 as the first commercially available MP3 player, but the MPMan beat that CD-player-sized wonder to market by several months.
The bulkiness and limited capabilities of both devices may make them seem quaint when compared to your 32-gigabyte (1000 times the capacity of the original MPMan)
iPod Touch, but these archaic devices helped spark a revolution that has completely changed the way we buy and consume music and media.
From
Register Hardware (via
Engadget)
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