10 years of MP3 players

From The Register’s hard­ware site: the first com­mer­cial MP3 player was intro­duced in march 1998 by Sae­han Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems, a South Korean com­pany. The MPMan F10 had 32mb of RAM, a par­al­lel port inter­face, and a numeric LCD display.

The Reg­is­ter has a photo of a later model, along with Creative’s Rio player. An RIAA law­suit briefly halted MP3 hard­ware sales in Octo­ber 1998.

Apple, of course, released its first iPod in Octo­ber 2001, and ported iTunes soft­ware to Win­dows in April 2003. When iPods lost their FireWire con­nec­tions and gained USB, con­sumer adop­tion began in earnest.

Ah, the mem­o­ries. LowEnd­Mac has an early time­line of the iPod for those who are interested.

Tagged as: Apple, audio, hardware, iPod, Korea, MP3, music, RIAA, USB