Ten Years Ago, There Were No IPods

It's amazing to think how far portable MP3 players have come, when you think that ten years ago there were no iPods. That's right, back then you had to use a walkman, discman, or similar non-digital device to listen to music on the go. But now we live in a whole different world.

Searching through old Larry King Live transcript at CNN.com, I found a now-amusing exchange between Larry King and Bill Gates on January 1, 2000, at a time when there were no iPods and very few people had heard of portable MP3 players. Here are some excerpts where Gates is explaining how to use a portable MP3 player to King, who has never seen one:

GATES: This device here can hold...

KING: It looks like a cell phone, but it's not.

...

GATES: This little chip here contains hours of music.

KING: I'll show it, you describe what I'm showing.

GATES: OK, so what you do is you take a song from a site where, hopefully, you pay for it and license it, download it into your computer, and then you put into this device. And then if you want to play it, you just, you know, push the button here and you pick exactly the song you want,

...

KING: How does it [the song] get in a chip?

GATES: Well, it all starts with the music label. Instead of printing disks, they'll have a site on the Internet where the actual song is stored....

[source: Larry King Live, January 1, 2000, at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0001/01/lklw.00.html]

Gates could not have imagined how soon his prediction would come true. MP3 players existed as early as 1998. I had an early Archos Jukebox myself, which must have been one of the first portable MP3 recorders (I loved it). But Apple's groundbreaking MP3 player, the iPod, was released October 23, 2001, according to Wikipedia. See, Wikipedia entry for iPod, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod.

Apple's iTunes store did just what Gates expected, distributing millions of songs to eager listeners. And now it's hard to find anyone under the age of 40 who does not have an iPod or similar device.

The fact that ten years ago there were no iPods and today there are millions of them floating around demonstrates just how fast technology is moving. In that same Larry King interview, Gates talked about the future of touch-screens. Now, of course, iPods, G1 phones, Blackberries, and numerous other devices feature that technology. I just wish Bill would get back on Larry King and tell us what's coming in the next ten years.

Sources:

Larry King Live, January 1, 2000, at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0001/01/lklw.00.html]

Wikipedia entry for iPod (downloaded April 1, 2009), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod.