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It's hard to believe, but it's been ten years since the introduction of the first portable, mass-produced hardware MP3 player. Originally developed by SaeHan Information Systems (Seoul, Korea) and sold in Asia in early 1998, the MPMan F10 appeared in the U.S. later that year under the Eiger Labs label.
It apparently came with a whopping 32 MB of flash memory - but could be factory upgraded to 64 MB - and ran on NiMH batteries. Another model, the MPMan F20, offered SmartMedia card memory expansion capability and ran on an AA battery.
Following closely on its heels was the similarly equipped Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300, which proved somewhat more successful and better known. I remember being intrigued at the time by these early MP3 players, but was never really tempted to buy one since I knew that no device with a storage capacity measured in megabytes was going to be able to satisfy my portable music needs.
It was an entirely different story, however, when the very first hard-drive-based MP3 player hit the market in late 1999. Called the Personal Jukebox PJB-100, it was originally developed by Compaq Research and licensed to HanGo Electronics Co., which presented the device at COMDEX in November of that year.
It had a storage capacity of 4.86 GB - enough for 100 128-kbit/s MP3-encoded CDs (thus the "100" in the model name). Other features included a 128 x 64-pixel non-backlit LCD and a 24-bit Motorola 56309 DSP running at 33 MHz.
I came very close to buying one of those early PJBs, but ended up instead with a Creative Technology Nomad Jukebox when it was introduced the following year. It originally came with a 6-GB hard drive, but I bought a 10-GB upgraded version, which I think I eventually upgraded further to 20 GB.
If you ask most people, they probably think that Apple invented the MP3 player (or at least the hard-drive-based version of such devices) with the iPod. In fact, the iPod didn't appear until late October 2001, nearly two years after the PJB-100 and 3-1/2 years after the MPMan.
Comments, questions or suggestions? Email me at rich.pell@verizon.net.
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