#Mp3 player 2000s serial

Audible MobilePlayerĭevice type: A pre-MP3 audio player, focused on audiobooks Lazy Game Reviews did a review of this device a few years back. And while FlashPAC was a bit of a flash-in-the-pan (sorry), it was important formative thinking at the time. In the world of music PAC was overshadowed by another audio format that’s still in use today, AAC, but its innovations deeply influenced other audio formats, along with later forms of streaming audio. Supporting PCMCIA Flash cards, the device utilized a specialized processor called Euphony a MIPS-based device that was designed to handle audio processing and networking. (Notably, outside of telephones, PAC was used as the audio codec for Sirius satellite radio.)Īs a part of these efforts came FlashPAC, one of the first audio players to hit the market (though, like the AT&T-branded EO Personal Communicator, not at any real scale). One of them was an audio codec, called Perceptual Audio Coder (PAC), which was widely used in telephony and audio applications where networking was used. As a part of these efforts, the organization came up with a number of technologies to help enable this broader goal. In the 1990s, AT&T Labs-better known as the iconic Bell Labs-was working on an effort to develop a way to better deliver audio to people. AT&T FlashPAC digital music playerĭevice type: A barely-released pre-MP3 music player More correctly, he invented the digital music player.)

(A lot of publishers overplayed Kane’s role, stating he “invented” the iPod. Years later, Apple basically took advantage of this fact in a lawsuit, citing Kramer’s work as prior art and hiring him as a consultant, which Kramer appreciated. But Kramer struggled to move his prototypes past the idea stage due to business challenges, and when the time came to renew the patent, he simply didn’t have the money. It had many of the elements of many later MP3 players-though unlike later MP3 players, it could only hold a single three-and-a-half-minute song due to bubble memory’s limitations. The device was the size of a credit card, utilized bubble memory (a predecessor of flash memory), and had an LCD screen. What if you had the basic idea for a device that could change the world two decades before it was viable, and you took the time to actually file a patent for it? Then you’d be Kane Kramer, a British man who developed the idea for the digital audio player in 1979, when he was just 23 years old.

#Mp3 player 2000s serial

Device type: A prototype device developed by a serial inventor