Nate Lanxon

Nate Lanxon is CNET UK's Senior Editor of News and Features, and covers every aspect of technology for Crave. He also enjoys popular-science books, obscure Japanese animation and plays 'technical metal' on the drums, whatever that is.

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Wednesday 12 March 2008, 9:20am

The 10th anniversary of the MP3 player

In 1998, the late Steve Irwin's daughter Bindi was born. In the same year, Robert B. Laughlin won the Nobel prize in physics for his explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect -- a joint success shared with Daniel C. Tsui and Horst L. Störmer. But closer to my heart, 1998 saw the birth of the first portable MP3 player. It was Eiger Labs' MPMan F10, and it had just 32MB of on-board flash memory.

Happy birthday, MPMan! Many happy returns. Oh.

With its tiny LCD screen, its parallel port and its little NiMH battery, the MPMan was the first taste of things to come in the world of digital music. It was first seen at CeBIT, the Hannover-based electronics show in Germany, which, as you'll notice by sporadic coverage of this year's show, had nothing that special on display this year.

The company behind MPMan -- Korea's Saehan Information Systems -- was one of the companies that joined SDMI, a group we highlighted this week as part of our vapourware feature. This 'Secure Digital Music Initiative' was an attempt to tackle music piracy by means of DRM, but suffered what we call 'Epic Fail Syndrome', and caved in 2001, by which time Apple's iPod was beginning its epic road to consumer dominance.

And now with 160GB iPods, 32GB flash-based MP3 players, and hard disk-boasting H.264 video players, we can celebrate everything MPMan initiated. So rock on, MPMan. The recording industry despised you, the public didn't buy into you, and Apple stole your skin. But no one can steal your right to the crown of 'History's Biggest Middle Finger to the Music Industry', and for that we salute you. -Nate Lanxon

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I remember reviewing the MPMan alongside the not-first-but-more-famous Diamond Rio. They had 32MB of memory, which meant you could put on about 32mins of music, or just over an hour if you ripped at 64Kbps. After walking round town for a day listening to the same 12 pop songs, it was pretty clear that portable players weren't going to be big sellers until the capacity increased. The fact that my 12 songs were being sung by the boy-and-girl-band of the day, Steps, probably didn't help...

Posted by Mary Lojkine on Fri 14 March, 2008 6:19 PM

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Crikey, has it been 10 years since the first MP3 players? Makes me feel old!! I remember a good friend of mine had a Diamond Rio when I was in 6th form, at the time it was so cutting edge to be able to access 32MB of near cd quality music from such a small device, but like most I only converted to portable MP3 with the iPod, the first MP3 player that was actually worth owning (well, Gen2 onwards anyway!!)

Posted by Philip Bain on Tue 25 March, 2008 8:30 PM

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