The MP3 player: 10 years old this month

Hard to remember a time when we didn't walk around with MP3 players in our pockets, right? But back in 1998—a time when MP3s themselves were still gaining traction, and a year before Napster burst onto the scene—most of us were still toting portable CD players.

Then came the humble, 32MB MPMan F10, the very first (and very bulky) portable MP3 player, which debuted back in March 1998.

The UK's Register Hardware is running a brief appreciation of the Korean-made F10, a rather ungainly (6.5 by 3.6 by 2.8 inches), ugly block of an MP3 player with a pint-sized LCD, a couple of stubby buttons, and a parallel-port connection (yep, you heard right—no USB) to a PC.

The F10 was first unveiled in March 1998 at the CeBIT conference in Hanover, Germany, and went on to hit stores that summer for a hefty $250.

Unsurprisingly, the ground-breaking but crude player met with a cool reception, and was soon eclipsed by the player that everyone (well, us geeks, that is) remembers—the $200 Rio PMP300, which came with a snazzier design, a bigger/better display, and Smart Media memory expansion. It also drew a September 1998 lawsuit from the RIAA—and indeed, that date marked the first time that I'd ever heard of the RIAA.

My first MP3 player? The Rio 500 from 1999, Diamond Multimedia's second-generation MP3 player, which came with 64MB of flash memory, USB (yes, USB!), and a groovy translucent shell. I loved it, all right, although I could only fit an album or two of tunes on it at a time.

A few months later, I stepped up to the Rio Volt SP100, one of the first MP3 CD players—at the time, a nice compromise between the bulky hard-drive based MP3 players (good for a whopping 5GB of storage) and the smaller flash players, which topped out at just 128MB or so. And by early 2002, I broke down and bought the first-generation iPod—all 5GB of it. I still have it in a drawer, and yes, it works (although it's pretty banged up).

Anyway—happy birthday (or birth-month) to the MP3 players of the world. And for the rest of you, what was your first MP3 player? Any old-school Rio fans out there?

Related:
Ten years old: the world's first MP3 player [Register Hardware]