I had a creative rio but it was basically worthless with 32 mb of ram. I started using computers in 80 and bought one in 82 so I was a early adopter of tech. To me these vids are not history but more of a trip down memory lane as you say.
@@ytgadfly I owned a lot of this early tech as well, if I had only put that money into Apple Stock. Anyway new rule is to stay 2 years behind the technology curve, that way I am not wasting my money on unproven tech
Futuristic videos are nice, but the _historytelling_ ones are awesome! The way he describes how we got here with all our different technologies - and the people who did them - is very fulfilling.
I still have the MPMan, bought it when it was released. Memory card with space for 7 MP3 songs, and still working great with original earplugs. I compressed these MP3 with one of the first DOS based compressors that was available at that time.
Tech history is littered with brilliant minds loosing out on recognition of their inventions & never financially reimbursed by those that making a fortune off them. Great video BTW. Love the history ones.
I watch ALOT of TH-cam, and Cold Fusion is among the very best (e.g. Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, SciShow, Wendover, Nerdwriter, Polyphonic, etc..). Just keep picking solid topics, and doing what you're doing!! Bravo.
Lol, welcome to the comments section. Just to let you know, it's _really_ fun down here. There's even a guy that has *100,000+ subscribers without any video content uploaded* because he's in every comments section.
more precisely: MP3 aka MPEG1 Layer3 was mainly invented in Erlangen, Germany at the "Fraunhofer Institute" (IIS-A) by a group of engineers around Prof. Seitzer and Dr. Karl-Heinz Brandenburg. (Source: I was one of the group members)
on my old 486 dx4 100, I ran redhat 2.4.x recompiled and optimized for audio. That fraunhofer binary was one of the most least cpu intensive binaries for running mp3s wake up music via cron.
Kannste vergessen, etwas anderes als autos oder wunderwaffen aus deutschland? gibt es nicht. lass uns lieber ueber das bekannteste produkt reden, als das relevanteste oder die ermöglichende grundlagenforschung. mein erster mp3 player kam aus korea als USB stick, und hatte ein FM radio mit eingebaut - jahre dannach kam der ipod von der apfelsekte war deutlich schlechter, ohen radio - und tat so sie hätten es erfunden. amerikaner halt. Korrekte historie interessiert nicht, jedenfalls dann nicht wenn dabei auslaender verdienste vorzuweisen haben.
I like these types of vids and your "How Big is..." playlist where you provide the history of innovators and how they started the companies we love and hate today. I also like your own nostalgic music mixes together with your amazing storytelling. That is what makes you pure gold in the TH-cam space (what I subscribed for originally when first watching ColdFustion at the time). Keep up the good work and keep on releasing more higher quality content
Bro u dont need to change anything,personally i love your videos and am a fun of the way you explain things in detail and your voice too(no homo). Keep it up man, just be you coz there are people who love and appriciate the hard work u put in...people like me! Bless up
Ikr? His voice is AMAZING. His style of videos is amazing too, and I love his choice of music. I really wanna hear him talk about future urban utopias with that kind of music, I think it would fit
... no it's not. there were numerous competing ebook formats. PDF is primarily used for pirating ebooks, as someone who's had a hand in writing postscript itself, and have had every major and a few minor brand ebook readers, and read ebooks on PDAs of every flavor before ebook readers were even a product (including cd-based clamshell devices) PDFs have never been used for commercial eBooks.
All of our tech is old. The first HD livestream was the moon landing. Before color tv was even a staple. Thats crazy. A lot of the later black in white broadcasting was also much higher quality than color tv up until very recently. A lot of ppl didnt realize that. The internet itself is also older than ppl realize. In the form of private intranet networks the network we now recognize as the internet has existed in a primitive form since the early 80s at LEAST. Nothing is original anymore. Things that come out now are mainly just improved versions of things that already existed in a private sector of society made public like the internet for example.
And that ultimately is a good thing. Lots of research, development, analysis etc. When releasing new products and services that are feasible and profitable in todays rapidly changing market. You can complain about e-waste, vapid consumerism and Planned obsolescence etc. But it has lead us to the plentiful amount of choices and freedom to choose from, prices ranging from cheap, affordable and high end, pushing the limits of cutting edge and affordability.
The only problem is it's INCORRECT. PDA's like the popular Compaq iPaq (NOTICE THE NAME) came out years before the iPod and had a color graphical user interface to play MP3's much like today's smart phones!!!
I'm always impressed by the amount of effort you put into your videos Dagogo, always well researched with captivating visuals. I'm a big fan of the recent history of the tech industry videos you put out, because I always learn something new, or they cover a topic I would never have given a second thought to had it have popped into my own mind. Thank you for introducing me to Kramer, he should be remembered for something more than defence in a law suit.
aeonjoey if he is worth more than $200 million, why was he portrayed as a furniture salesman who made no money from his idea? Is the video lying? I would not be selling furniture if I were worth more than $200 million.
@@baronvoncalculon486 the man is a Furniture salesman, what this video left out was that the guy was a prolific inventor and was getting royalties for thousands of different types of inventions also he was a fairly good businessman. He had a lot of different tech inventions and was the CEO of multiple companies.
This video ignores some interesting parts of the history: the competition between Creative Labs NOMAD players, the Microsoft Zune, iRiver devices, and Apple's iPod. The reason iPod eventually dominated was that their devices were so well designed, pretty, slick, more compact (iPod actually stole the interface idea from Creative Labs, and had to settle the lawsuit). iPod didn't immediately squash the competition because of the requirement that people use iTunes (which was and still is a buggy monstrosity -- although I did grow to like it more, with time). On the other hand, Creative Labs had significantly better sounds quality (my subjective opinion), and you could simply drag and drop files into the player, which many preferred (and it had a replaceable hard drive, which I upgraded to 100GB several years before iPod could match that). I think it's the success of the iPhone which led to the iTunes ecosystem domination, which ultimately squashed other mp3 players (note that some successful models by competitors were quite profitable even *after* iPod was released, but in my view the very successful iPhone 4 - not the iPod - put an end to that)
Yes, this! I had a Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox months before the first iPod came out. It had the interface that this video claims originated with the iPod. While a little bulky, I loved it. I was a cab driver and spent long hours in my cab, which was equipped with a nice Pioneer cassette stereo with an auxiliary input surely designed to have a portable CD player connected to it. It was a late 90s Ford Crown Vic, and my Nomad sat on the transmission hump on the floor, held in place by velcro. I would periodically update it’s music at home with a third party software that gave it drag and drop support using the file Explorer in Windows 98. At home, I had networked Windows machines in every room with Winamp 2.91 playing music from my main library on one of the PCs in my home office that had a large secondary hard drive dedicated to mo3 storage. I sold CDs on Amazon & half.com, ripping them all to my PC prior to sale, and also regularly got other mp3s trading with friends online via IRC & private ftp servers. I lost all this in my divorce in 2003, but did own an iRiver a couple years later, and loved it. Unlike the iPod, it had a tuner, could record off the radio, had a line input and microphone it could record from, and was simply treated by Windows XP as a flash storage drive, so recordings could easily be dragged to my PC for editing and archiving. While the storage capacity was much lower than an iPod or Nomad jukebox, the device was the size of a cigarette lighter, used a single AAA battery, and was much more useful to me at the time, as I only needed enough music on board to listen while walking or using transportation, and was involved in local music and loved having a small device capable or making high quality live soundboard recordings of local bands.
I have heard bill burr rant about this for so long and I thought he was just trying to annoy the Steve Jobs Stans. 'Thank you for giving it structure.'
7:01 Actually no. That kind of Menu was appeared first on Creative DAP (or Nomad) almost a year *before* ipod. It also had a hard drive, infrared input, audio input for recording from external sources, 2 different audio outputs with 4 channels for EAX surround effects, etc... Apple was like a Neanderthal relative in comparison.
@David Frischknecht I think that Creative sued Apple and not the opposite. Apple lost the sue and paid 100 million to settle: www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2006/aug/23/applepays100m
Yes, I bought my first Creative Nomad player in 2000 and then Archos jukebox in 2001 which had more capacity for relatively small form factor, more capacity, had a tiny display to play even mp4 videos and extension port to add hardware modules like video recorder! All these before the first music only iPod came to existence!
I was probably one of the last people that still carried around a portable CD player when everyone was walking around with iPods. This was in 2006. Having an iPod was a status symbol. And when I got my first iPod Nano in 2007, it blew me away. It felt futuristic to have tons of CDs worth of music in this little device. I still have it today, but I have since gone with my iPod Touch, which unfortunately is going away really soon. For me, having local music and not having to worry about a monthly payment plan is one of the many perks that I wish isn’t being killed off by greedy corporations. Now if I want a device solely for music, I have to spend almost $1000 on a new iPhone.
My first peice of portable technology was an oldish iPod when I was 12; cost me $10, wouldn't power on, turned out the battery needed charging through a non USB connection. The 3rd gen iPod (classic) was incredible, and I've been in constant pursuit of portable innovation ever since.
One minor point of contention. The internet and home computers existed in 1979, they just weren't an ubiquitous presence as they are now. The World Wide Web's invention and the computing boom of the nineties changed that. They weren't born in a vacuum. They were revolutionary improvements on systems already in use.
Not really. At the time it was arpanet that was closed network connection and gave birth to the Internet. Yes home computer's was a thing but it was very early, they started 1975 being altair 8800 first (sort of debatable fact), 1976 Apple 1 and many others started to emerge into the consumer market. But everything was really new at that time and not adopted very well.
I still have my Frontier Labs players from many years ago. Unlike most ipod, they still work. The batteries are regular AA, rather than a soldered-in proprietary battery.
I found this fascinating, and posted to my friends on Facebook. I remember in mid-2000s seeing a friend with an Apple mp3 player and I was tripped out by its interface and construction. I remember when the Walkman came out in the 80s, amazing us. This seemed similar. And yet both of these lasted so short comparatively because of how quickly tech changes, and that to me is also part of the historical importance of this. My parents grew up with records, and those were there for their entire generation. Me, I have to put up with tech changes and disruptions every 10-15 years, I find that interesting.
Like light bulbs, Planned Obsolescence. Those portable music devices were great for the Time. Just not as great as the transistor radio.. Less great was the CD Walkman...i was not a fan of the CD when they came out, being touted as "lasting Forever"...i knew their construction & i'm like...yeah? Nope. & i was right...Most loose their coherency after a decade, no matter how well it is stored the powder shifts & some falls off leaving tiny holes that can't be read because Nothing is there to read..inevitable. Leaving some of us with Mountains of holographic shiny garbage. Glad i backed everything up on external HDs...& glad for the YT videos on some cool DIY creations we can make from em, lol
@Josh A i am genuinely Glad for ya...Cherish it! To be perfectly honest..it seems only those disks We burn erode.....i have just recently checked my long forgotten stash of movies & records on CDs & see All still play except 4....loss of 4 aint bad...but..all those we burned...literal mountains of therm....unusable.
Its arguable if they are scamming or not, but if people actually FELT scammed by Apple, they would not continue to buy their products. Yet Apple is one of the world's most profitable companies with legions of loyal customers...maybe it would be more accurate to say Apple is good at convincing and brainwashing people into thinking their products are worth the prices they charge for them. This is something every company tries to do, but Apple seems to do better, as you said. It also doesn't change the fact that Apple has changed the market many times with their products, in particular the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Until each of these products, the markets for said products were small to non existent, and they had significant influence in how these products look, feel, and behave after their versions of the products were released. I agree it is a bit annoying when they get up on stage and announce a feature that has already existed for years and tout it like they are releasing a revolutionary new feature. That said, I don't agree with you that they didn't invent anything. I suppose it depends on your definition of the word 'invent', since any idea in the world would have been thought about already. Before Mac there was Xerox, before iPod there was competing players, before iPhone there were other smartphones, and before iPad there were other tablets. But its a strong argument to say none of those alternative 'first' products were a breakthrough success that created or expanded the existing market in a significant way. If nothing else, its fair to say Apple gets credit for inventing some products because they were the first ones to have large market success with those respective products. For example, Apple invented the first mass market smartphone with a multi-touch display (note the LG Prada was not multi-touch...arguably not even mass market...). If you want to discuss scams, try Luxottica, the sunglass maker that makes a great majority of the world's eyewear. None of the Ray Ban or Oakley products (for example) are worth $150 and up, and the marketing fluff about space age material and optics used are just tinted glass, polarization coatings, and standard materials for the frame like metal and plastic. Luxottica own Every brand sold in Sunglass Hut for example, as well as Sunglass Hut itself! They have a near-monopoly and use it to bully competitors out of business then charge exorbitant prices for their eyewear! Meanwhile, they make it seem like competition exists, and that you have a choice to buy from many different companies when you choose sunglasses or other eyewear. Sounds like something closer to a scam than what Apple does to me.
This is the first time I have watched a ColdFusion video. What an excellent production! I hugely enjoy documentary videos revealing the history of everyday objects. This is a truly quality production - informative, well-researched (no lazy references to Wikipedia), interesting and professionally produced. I also appreciated the narration : clear, coherent and succinct. Well done "ColdFusion" - keep up the good work. (Marius Gudonis, Warsaw, Poland)
7:08 What? The biggest problem with mp3 players at the turn of the century sure enough was NOT the user interface, but miserable storage capacity! Yes, the typical user interface back then WOULD have been actually unbearably crappy if there were ACTUALLY hundreds or thousands of songs to browse through... But players at the time could only store a dozen or two songs! So, it's wrong to say Apple solved any already existing problem. What they did was to provide an adequate interface for the massive storage solution they also introduced (by means of basing the player on a mechanical disk drive instead of solid state memory, of course).
Not sure this is true. Several mp3 players competed with iPod in terms of capacity: I still have Creative Labs NOMAD Zen Xtra with a 60GB hard drive, purchased in 2003. Plus, it had a replaceable hard drive, so I upgraded to 100GB, and it took 5 years for the iPod to catch up to that. Microsoft's Zune (the main competitor to Creative Labs and Apple) also had a large capacity mp3 player, as did couple other companies. Every serious music lover I knew had at least a couple mp3 players around the time iPod was released. The reason iPod beat the competition so quickly is partly due to the interface, as the video explains, but also that they looked so much prettier, and more compact for the capacity. On the other hand, the iTunes requirement prevented it from squashing the competition right away - I for one would never have switched to iTunes and iPod, and still used my Creative NOMAD even after I got an iPhone (Creative Labs sounds quality was better due to their superior DAC)
Depends on the player, my 2nd MP3 player was a Genexxa portable CD player that would play, of course, 650-700MB of MP3s off an ISO-9660 disc... but I'd have to use a special utility to print off a track list on paper to correspond songs to a track number(!) that would show on the player. A later Kenwood player I had worked the same way. Then I got a Creative Nomad Jukebox, which used the interface the iPod would later adopt, minus the wheel.
Thats absolutely true. They were incredibly slow and controlled environments not open to the general public however. Most of the usage took place in universities and such.
Yeah Internet has existed for a crazy long time, a lot of people are getting "internet" and "http" mixed up. http is what we know the internet as today but there is a long history of net use decades before http's invention
$600 for an mp3 player with 64MB of storage. It'll be mind blowing looking back 20 years from now and viewing the iPhone X & Note 9 as very limited portable devices.
@@lootbox289 I can only imagine. Augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, advanced robotics all strapped into one device maybe and who knows what else.
@Odysseus I'm excited about advanced robotics in particular simply because I'm a fan of the movie iRobot from 2004. VR, AR & AI all working in conjunction with that. Think of augmented reality support centers which are where people using VR & AR systems control the robots for all different scenarios, from industrial to domestic work. VR allowing normal people to escape into another reality for a while or for their favorite game & AI in every other device because for some reason we have this innate need to talk to our devices.
@6:30 yes no one took it seriously because it could only hold 12 songs at 128kb/s and most people understood that this didn't give meaningful advantage over any other available tech.
Typical behaviour from Apple; they couldn't even bring themselves to reward Kramer properly, and gave him an iPod instead. What a disgusting insult. Without exception, "profit over humanity" is their sole raison d'être. Soulless, profiteering snakes. That's why I'll never buy their stuff.
Boo Hoo, the world is full of people with good ideas and not enough smarts to make it happen so the people who can do it, do do it. Survival of the fittest. You don't get honored for failing, neither should you get trashed but that's naturally what happens.
@@Philjj61 I get what you're saying. I don't totally agree, there are parts of their business model that is close to extortion so maybe he should have said, "you want my testimony? That could be arranged for the right price" then you set it up for 15% of what Boost.com would get, if they won. Make it worth it to play ball. And you never have to take a call on a ladder again. Regardless Apple is all about wringing the most money out of their customers, without regard for quality or value. Microsoft is no different.
mnd I’ve had several portable MP3 players over the years. I had one of those. Not my favorite, but It was perfect for what I was doing at the time. I prepared legal documents for people, and was able to use it as a flash drive to bring my documents back and forth from law libraries to home, and still had enough space on it for the music I listened to on my public transit commute.
Fascinating, I first learned of mp3 in 1995. A cousin was in a university study and they were tinkering with the format. He emailed me a couple of tracks. It wasn't until 2003 that I got my first portable player.
So Apple stole the idea from it's original creator, used him in their legal defense, and never even gave him royalties for _his own idea?_ Another reason why I'm never buying an apple product.
Correct, but it feels like they treated his in a shady manner, though technically they were within their rights. Sometimes, being technically right, doesn't equate with being morally good. I think that is what people are trying to express.
Jezza : No. The patent was run out and not renewed. Talking about it is pointless. You should never buy any tech product. All of them have the same “issues”.
Just stumbled upon this. Fascinwting history, and great production. I recently started using Squarespace myself. I will watch for any new materisl you release.
You did a great job! An all-inclusive package. Usually it is hard to find some articles which include tech aspects, historical aspects and social aspects all at one package. It is comprehensive and your way of storytelling is amusing, which makes it even more tangible. Thanks and good luck!
I am am an old time tech geek. I have just found your channel in the last few days. I have very basic outline knowledge of a lot of the topics you covered. I have seen a dozen videos on your channel in the last few days that gave me the complete story on a lot of subjects, this topic the mp3 player, the MS dos story, the iphone etc.. Great channel. Love your work.
I still have my Diamond Rio! Didn’t know it was the second MP3 player ever.😎 It would only hold about 10 songs and that was at 128k sampling rate. Still, having a player that you could run with and it didn’t skip was amazing.
Dagogo, this is a great video. I love computing history - having read the histories of Intel, Fairchild Semiconductor, Hewlett-Packard and Apple among others. Keep making this genre. Thanks.
No, his patent didn't include the encoding or decoding mechanism (MP3), the distribution mechanism(iTunes), DRM (which though a pain in the ass was pivotal in getting record companies on board). He just thought of the concept of a pocket-sized digital music player, but didn't specify how any of it would work, or bother with the logistics and expense of R&D, marketing etc. Imagine you figure out how to make a surplus generating fusion power plant. That doesn't mean everyone who's thought about fusion power before "Invented it". They vaguely conceptualized a world in which it might exist, you made it real. But it's OK to tip your hat to the people who's vision may have inspired some of your ideas. In this case, they used him to undermine a patent troll who claimed they invented it by showing the court "No, this other guy did and had a patent back in the 1970's". And they paid him for his testimony, and gave him credit which could be a boost to his future career. Handing him a free iPod was just a gesture. "Here's the revolutionary device you envisioned 20 years ago... something that's had a greater impact on modern music than the Beatles. It's not a dream anymore, it's a real thing you can hold in your hand." That should be profoundly rewarding. Having an dream and knowing how to realize it are two totally different things. To then both realize that dream and market it successfully is equally challenging. To give him royalties would have massively increased the cost when the product was entering the market. Even a few cents per unit sold would have been profoundly expensive as they were basically selling the units at (and sometimes below) cost, and trying to make their profit in the iTunes store. This was a new concept in music, few record companies were on board at the time, many more were willing to take Apple to court to shut down iTunes, equating it to Napster and newsgroup piracy. To their minds, anything in "MP3" was bad because it could be shared infinitely. It was a risky move for apple. If it didn't pan out, it might have sunk the company. However, I would have thrown the guy a hundred shares of stock. Though in fairness, if he believed in the idea of the MP3 player, he could have bought that stock, or made it a condition of his assistance to Apple in their patent lawsuit. If he didn't do that, it's kinda his own fault. That's a better option than developing the idea himself. Had he not let the patent expire, he would have needed to line up investors (who would take the majority of all profits anyway), spend years in R&D, millions of his own money or equity in the company and then had to market it under a brand name nobody had ever heard of. If he bought stock in apple, he would be invested in the idea still, but with someone else taking the majority of the risk, someone with a massive market presence, legal teams to keep the lawsuits down, who have their own manufacturing facilities... Paying $50k to buy their stock is less than what he would have to invest to start a company himself, with a massively better prospect of an ROI. Again, he doesn't know how to capitalize on his idea. He can claim to have known all along that this would be the future of music, but when his faith in the idea was tested, he failed to take that leap. Ideas are for visionaries, but money seeks the bold. Not everyone can be both of those things, just be grateful if your either of them, lol.
surfitlive : While they had one or two brilliant guys inventing graphical plus mechanical user interfaces, Xerox totally messed up any real product development for these technologies. They actively decided not to use the technology and locked it away. Good that somebody did use it. I’m not aware of any Xerox fonts. TrueType? PostScript?
Old technology history in video form makes it easier to recap, than reading it in written form with heavy technology terms and nomenclature So this video makes 'quick history recap' possible for every type or viewer. I had two ipods and a cassette player walkman too, so it was just simpler to go along with the video. Very complete effort! Thanks man.
I have a question about the book: Would you consider releasing an audio book narrated by you? I mean your voice is second only to Morgan Freeman's. Would love to hear you talk about technology for hours.
We love all of your videos. Keep doing what your doing! One of my favorite videos was the history and back story to Nikola Tesla. Fascinating! Love that guy and all he has done.
I really hate these extra commercials. And I instantly thumb it down, we already watch commercials before and in the middle of a youtube video. Well let's add one at the beginning too.
You used to have pay them for a license to use the codec, but not any more. Of course, there were always free ones. www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html
Great stuff! I work for the 3rd company ever to make an MP3 decoder IC (VS1001) and the first chipmaker to make their own MP3 implementation after the original Fraunhofer IIS partners. (That's my impression.. I'm not 100% sure). Anyway, if you want to do your own MP3 player today, just seek out our VS1010 chip at our forum. Hmm, one thing came to mind: actually, the MP3 was not created to make music files, it was thought to be the next gen satellite radio format. For that reason, it's really streamable! For example, MP3 doesn't have any file headers, all MP3 blocks are self contained and contain their own header, including sample rate etc. Proof: you can cat together 2 MP3 files with different sample rates and the resulting file will play ok. Because in satellite broadcasting, you cannot rely on any file header to be received - you can tune in to the station at any time and immediately start receiving, even in the middle of a song. I think this is (apart from PCM WAV) still a unique feature of the MP3 format.
In response to your request on content, you should do whatever is interesting to you. Judging from your past content, I'm sure we will also find it interesting. Because there is a lot of competition among channels like yours to find new ideas, you cannot afford to limit yourself to one narrow avenue. Your content often has a great visionary touch added, that other channels don't have, so you shouldn't lose that. The mp3 player story was good. Apple should've given that guy a token $2 million dollar check. They could've easily afforded it. Corporate greed and selfishness...unbelievable.
MacXpert74 : But then he had no active patent anymore. He basically gave up on his “sketch” long before. As an engineer, maybe he was just satisfied that someone actually built this device. He did not need the money anyway...
Love from India Gogo. I personally love all your videos but prefer the forward looking ones slightly more. Keep up the great work, n also, will love to read your book too, cheers.
No mention of the Creative/Apple lawsuit. Creative had an almost identical user interface prior to the announcement of the iPod which they used on their Jukebox/Nomad series..
Youngest generations actually don´t store massive numbers of mp3s anymore. It's pure online music now. Even I (and I am in my 40s) do not listen to the massive mp3 collection I have anymore (mostly ripped from the CD collection I had back in the days) , but I do have a Deezer premium account.
I love tech history. I get to learn new ideas from old concepts. See how things started, how they changed, if at all, foresee where they may go. Mr. Kramer got official recognition for his invention, but with lapsed patents how can he force any of the digital media players to pay royalties? And those SSDs he was going to use were essentially a new age media taking the place of vinyl records and audio tape.
Hey! That was a great minidoc about the mp3 and the "player" (s) that made it all possible. I'm subscribed and off to find more of your vids on the history of the stuff we take for granted or just threw away for newer stuff. RIP Kramer. Sounds like something Apple would do. Too bad he didn't push for better recognition (and an ipod that actually worked.)
I do enjoy this style of historical story telling. It's actually why I like your channel that much more than any other. Keep it up man, see ya in the next one!
Adblock plus has been garbage after being bought out. Ublock Origin is where its at. Oh and I'm watching this from an unrooted phone... So not using a form of ad block atm
@@McRambro : The video stated that MP3 was the key technology behind these players. If it makes a false or "incomplete" statement on this key factor, it leaves a strange taste. www.mp3-history.com www.mp3-history.com/en/timeline.html
Maybe do a video about how Nokia might have had a modern style smartphone several years before Apple's iPhone, if they had only listened to a Finish inventor, who showed an early working prototype of such a device with touchscreen, swiping, scroling & internet connection as well as other features to the Nokia board members already in 2002? They thought it was an interesting concept, but didn't want to develop his idea any further - having invested fortunes in designs of their own (akward) OS, loads of classic mobile designs with keyboards and production lines for such mobiles etc. - , so they only gave him 5 minutes for his sales pitch and didn't even really get to play around with his mysterious new "smartphone" with its magic touch screen. Some people just can't see a great idea, even it hits them right between the eyes, and unfortunately they far too often sit as board members in big companies and want everything to remain the same more or lesd, even when their systems, technology and designs will very soon be obsolete - because they simply can't bring themselves to admit this. If they had just had some teenagers present to react to and play with this new phone type alongside their own classical types & designs, they would have had no doubt which way things would be moving rapidly. 😉 Check out BBC's "The Rise & Fall of Nokia" ( ca. 42 mins in )
For some reason even though you are the only channel i have the bell on, youtube wont send me notification i think they don’t want me to watch your videos.
One of the idiots at my local Apple store from the Genius bar once told me while I was looking at iPods.. The guy told me that Apple invented the MP3 player and everyone else copies them.. I died laughing in his face as I walked out..
Lol... yeah, if people know someone's a "Genius" because it says so on their name tag, which they're required to wear to a $12/hr part-time job at a shopping mall, that person should probably just keep their mouth shut, so as not to break the illusion.
Well...Apple may not have invented the MP3 Player but they definitely perfected it. He's right about one thing though - everyone copies the iPod or based their design on something that did(looking at you Android)
Archos Jukebox was released in 2000 (before the iPod) and it featured a huge improvement in navigation. So no, the iPod wasn't the first to address this issue.
My brother saved money from his part-time job and bought a tdk 1x cd burner for our windows 98 pc. We were probably the only ones at our school with a cd burner. It was very slow, but it changed our lives lol. We were able to download songs/albums on napster that weren't released in our state, yet, and burn them to cd. We felt super cool lmao
This video gave a very good historical perspective into MP3 format and devices. How about doing a video on computer storage devices and media from early 3rd generation computers like PDP-11 and VAX systems running with Card readers, tape drives and then disk drums and then to early IBM PCs using 360 KB Floppy disks and 10 MB Hard drives. Thanks
I still have my old MP3 players and they are still working 😁 And yes, this kinda of videos is what got me into your channel.. this and the and 'How big is...' series.. Good luck mate
There is absolutely no way Krammer could have made his version of an MP3 player. The mp3 format, jut as all mp formats are proprietary formats which he had no access to. The mp3 format was hacked and exploited by the music pirating industry, which is why we have the format available today. No music company could have used it until it was declared lost in court, then several manufacturers offered mp3 players, until Apple's ipod player allowed the format on its players. Apple claiming that Krammer was the inventor is just an excuse to get out of the legal bind it was in.
Most of Apples innovation is in rethinking a existing concept and making it into a more useable one. As mentioned in this video, the earlier MP3 players were clunky to use and had very limited storage. Apple re-imagined the concept and made it into a easy to use and much more powerful device that people did want to use. The previous players didn't really offer much over a CD-walkman with their limited flash storage. But the mini hard disk that Apple put into the player all of a sudden made it into a product that allowed you to take a large collection of songs with you in your pocket. So yes, it *was* a innovative product, although it wasn't the first MP3 player.
they weren't "literally the richest company on earth" back then. this was when they first made the ipod. apple was little more than an obscure computer company.
Not really rest to sure he got paid off the technology didn’t exist at the time that we came up the idea so I have to wait for a company in technology to catch up. The patent had already expired
I still buy cds so I can get the WAV files. I know mp3 has come a long way, but wav is closer to studio quality. You can especially hear the difference when muting the mid/mono, and listening to the side/stereo. Mp3 has a compressed watery sound. Wav is perfect.
I'm one of the few people who still use an iPod. It's a last gen Classic and I love it for its storage capacity and that it does just what it's supposed to, and so far with no sign of battery degradation. I love being able to carry my (obscure) music library around with no need to be connected.
Uhm ... wait a minute! You do all that research but you forget to mention that the mp3 format was developed at a university in Germany by engineers such as Karlheinz Brandenburg?
I would argue that phones supporting Mp3 songs were what killed the Mp3 player, not the iPod. The ipod merely stuck around longer since it housed a lot more songs and sold better due to good marketing.
Mika Korhonen I remember those days. I would actually rip a few CDs to wav files, and then when I left for work, start a batch file that would convert them to mp3s while I was gone.
The Creative Nomad could also manage large libraries. iTunes and Microsoft made iPod successful, not the click wheel. It's only when Apple made the deal to sell songs for 1$ via iTunes, made iTunes available on Windows and made iPod connect via USB, not FireWire, things took off. Before that, iPod was struggling.
I just bought a Sony Digital Walkman a few months ago. Significantly better audio quality than iPods but you can't create a playlist prior to adding music & you have to get an SD card to expand how much music it holds, so kinda pricey.
I am 59 and was a purchaser of many of these early devices, these videos are a great trip down memory lane, keep them coming
Check out LGR, he does a lot of old tech too
Or technology connections
Any advice for a lost Young man?
I had a creative rio but it was basically worthless with 32 mb of ram. I started using computers in 80 and bought one in 82 so I was a early adopter of tech. To me these vids are not history but more of a trip down memory lane as you say.
@@ytgadfly I owned a lot of this early tech as well, if I had only put that money into Apple Stock. Anyway new rule is to stay 2 years behind the technology curve, that way I am not wasting my money on unproven tech
I liked this video. Keep up the great work. Though I also like the futuristic videos you make
Futuristic videos are nice, but the _historytelling_ ones are awesome! The way he describes how we got here with all our different technologies - and the people who did them - is very fulfilling.
Def one for Futurist videos too.
I still have the MPMan, bought it when it was released. Memory card with space for 7 MP3 songs, and still working great with original earplugs. I compressed these MP3 with one of the first DOS based compressors that was available at that time.
L3enc.exe
Wow, is your MPMan still working in 2023?
Tech history is littered with brilliant minds loosing out on recognition of their inventions & never financially reimbursed by those that making a fortune off them. Great video BTW. Love the history ones.
Exactly it’s a strange world
its almost as if patent law has failed us and china may actually be more free market in that aspect than we are.
@@jimster1111yeah free market of stolen IP
I don’t know if I’ve ever commented on TH-cam before, but everything you make is gold!
Nathan Griffith I was gonna post something on similar lines
interesting !
I watch ALOT of TH-cam, and Cold Fusion is among the very best (e.g. Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, SciShow, Wendover, Nerdwriter, Polyphonic, etc..).
Just keep picking solid topics, and doing what you're doing!!
Bravo.
Same here. Keep doing what you do, you are exceptionally good at it :)
Lol, welcome to the comments section.
Just to let you know, it's _really_ fun down here.
There's even a guy that has *100,000+ subscribers without any video content uploaded* because he's in every comments section.
more precisely: MP3 aka MPEG1 Layer3 was mainly invented in Erlangen, Germany at the "Fraunhofer Institute" (IIS-A) by a group of engineers around Prof. Seitzer and Dr. Karl-Heinz Brandenburg. (Source: I was one of the group members)
on my old 486 dx4 100, I ran redhat 2.4.x recompiled and optimized for audio. That fraunhofer binary was one of the most least cpu intensive binaries for running mp3s wake up music via cron.
@@coheher i still believe that as a historical fact it deserves more mentioning in a video with this title.
Kannste vergessen, etwas anderes als autos oder wunderwaffen aus deutschland? gibt es nicht.
lass uns lieber ueber das bekannteste produkt reden, als das relevanteste oder die ermöglichende grundlagenforschung.
mein erster mp3 player kam aus korea als USB stick, und hatte ein FM radio mit eingebaut - jahre dannach kam der ipod von der apfelsekte war deutlich schlechter, ohen radio - und tat so sie hätten es erfunden.
amerikaner halt. Korrekte historie interessiert nicht, jedenfalls dann nicht wenn dabei auslaender verdienste vorzuweisen haben.
Nope.
@@tomsaltner3011 no. Fake news.
I like these types of vids and your "How Big is..." playlist where you provide the history of innovators and how they started the companies we love and hate today. I also like your own nostalgic music mixes together with your amazing storytelling. That is what makes you pure gold in the TH-cam space (what I subscribed for originally when first watching ColdFustion at the time). Keep up the good work and keep on releasing more higher quality content
Bro u dont need to change anything,personally i love your videos and am a fun of the way you explain things in detail and your voice too(no homo). Keep it up man, just be you coz there are people who love and appriciate the hard work u put in...people like me! Bless up
True. true.
I couldn't have said it better.
Yes. This.
I'm just waiting for your audio book at this point
Ikr? His voice is AMAZING. His style of videos is amazing too, and I love his choice of music. I really wanna hear him talk about future urban utopias with that kind of music, I think it would fit
"Hey bro thanks for making billions of dollars in sales for us possible, here's a defective iPod lmao"
@Automobile Addict gtfo here
And countless recording artists ripped off gazillions
@Automobile Addict k
Sick misappropriation of Kramer's Intellectual Property rights - probably still worth claiming.
@Μαλακας Κουραδακιας
Yes 'mp3 players' were around before apple tried to corner that market for themselves.
E-Books and e-book readers also came to life in the 1970's. The technology is way older than most people realise
PDF is the original e-book format.
... no it's not. there were numerous competing ebook formats. PDF is primarily used for pirating ebooks, as someone who's had a hand in writing postscript itself, and have had every major and a few minor brand ebook readers, and read ebooks on PDAs of every flavor before ebook readers were even a product (including cd-based clamshell devices) PDFs have never been used for commercial eBooks.
@@aeonjoey3d u completely missed his point....
All of our tech is old. The first HD livestream was the moon landing. Before color tv was even a staple.
Thats crazy. A lot of the later black in white broadcasting was also much higher quality than color tv up until very recently. A lot of ppl didnt realize that.
The internet itself is also older than ppl realize. In the form of private intranet networks the network we now recognize as the internet has existed in a primitive form since the early 80s at LEAST.
Nothing is original anymore. Things that come out now are mainly just improved versions of things that already existed in a private sector of society made public like the internet for example.
@@juanmccoy3066 Yup, like Twitter. To me it looks just like an IRC client in a more userfriendly GUI
@@PhoenixNL72-DEGA- That would be discord
Love this stuff. Too many people forgetting their History.
And that ultimately is a good thing. Lots of research, development, analysis etc. When releasing new products and services that are feasible and profitable in todays rapidly changing market. You can complain about e-waste, vapid consumerism and Planned obsolescence etc. But it has lead us to the plentiful amount of choices and freedom to choose from, prices ranging from cheap, affordable and high end, pushing the limits of cutting edge and affordability.
👍😌😌
no such thing as strangx or not, not x's history or lovx, nonerx
It's not that they forget it.. They just NEVER really learn it.
The only problem is it's INCORRECT. PDA's like the popular Compaq iPaq (NOTICE THE NAME) came out years before the iPod and had a color graphical user interface to play
MP3's much like today's smart phones!!!
i worshiped my creative zen micro, kickass machine... haven't found anything better since.
I'm always impressed by the amount of effort you put into your videos Dagogo, always well researched with captivating visuals.
I'm a big fan of the recent history of the tech industry videos you put out, because I always learn something new, or they cover a topic I would never have given a second thought to had it have popped into my own mind.
Thank you for introducing me to Kramer, he should be remembered for something more than defence in a law suit.
Craig Jones ...yes ..he is the best...the way he makes the video is just out of this world
Well said! 👍🏽
Mr. Altraide, keep it up!
I don't like a lot of the pics that are related but not actually them, yet yours was awesome any...
Poor Kramer
is that a marshal art
Kane Kramer's net worth is over $230,000,000.00 U.S.
aeonjoey if he is worth more than $200 million, why was he portrayed as a furniture salesman who made no money from his idea? Is the video lying? I would not be selling furniture if I were worth more than $200 million.
@@baronvoncalculon486 the man is a Furniture salesman, what this video left out was that the guy was a prolific inventor and was getting royalties for thousands of different types of inventions also he was a fairly good businessman. He had a lot of different tech inventions and was the CEO of multiple companies.
@@lucifaerislifeandstuff5181 it still does not take away from the fact that he got screwed over.
This video ignores some interesting parts of the history: the competition between Creative Labs NOMAD players, the Microsoft Zune, iRiver devices, and Apple's iPod. The reason iPod eventually dominated was that their devices were so well designed, pretty, slick, more compact (iPod actually stole the interface idea from Creative Labs, and had to settle the lawsuit). iPod didn't immediately squash the competition because of the requirement that people use iTunes (which was and still is a buggy monstrosity -- although I did grow to like it more, with time). On the other hand, Creative Labs had significantly better sounds quality (my subjective opinion), and you could simply drag and drop files into the player, which many preferred (and it had a replaceable hard drive, which I upgraded to 100GB several years before iPod could match that). I think it's the success of the iPhone which led to the iTunes ecosystem domination, which ultimately squashed other mp3 players (note that some successful models by competitors were quite profitable even *after* iPod was released, but in my view the very successful iPhone 4 - not the iPod - put an end to that)
the reason why the ipod won was the itunes store
I too had a CL Nomad, and I LOVED IT. Drag N' Drop, excellent sound quality. I still have it, alas, it won't turn on. Maybe, just maybe....
Where is mini disk?
you make a video then.... on all the shit he missed
Yes, this! I had a Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox months before the first iPod came out. It had the interface that this video claims originated with the iPod. While a little bulky, I loved it. I was a cab driver and spent long hours in my cab, which was equipped with a nice Pioneer cassette stereo with an auxiliary input surely designed to have a portable CD player connected to it. It was a late 90s Ford Crown Vic, and my Nomad sat on the transmission hump on the floor, held in place by velcro. I would periodically update it’s music at home with a third party software that gave it drag and drop support using the file Explorer in Windows 98. At home, I had networked Windows machines in every room with Winamp 2.91 playing music from my main library on one of the PCs in my home office that had a large secondary hard drive dedicated to mo3 storage. I sold CDs on Amazon & half.com, ripping them all to my PC prior to sale, and also regularly got other mp3s trading with friends online via IRC & private ftp servers.
I lost all this in my divorce in 2003, but did own an iRiver a couple years later, and loved it. Unlike the iPod, it had a tuner, could record off the radio, had a line input and microphone it could record from, and was simply treated by Windows XP as a flash storage drive, so recordings could easily be dragged to my PC for editing and archiving. While the storage capacity was much lower than an iPod or Nomad jukebox, the device was the size of a cigarette lighter, used a single AAA battery, and was much more useful to me at the time, as I only needed enough music on board to listen while walking or using transportation, and was involved in local music and loved having a small device capable or making high quality live soundboard recordings of local bands.
I have heard bill burr rant about this for so long and I thought he was just trying to annoy the Steve Jobs Stans. 'Thank you for giving it structure.'
"...GET ON IT!"
7:01 Actually no.
That kind of Menu was appeared first on Creative DAP (or Nomad) almost a year *before* ipod.
It also had a hard drive, infrared input, audio input for recording from external sources, 2 different audio outputs with 4 channels for EAX surround effects, etc...
Apple was like a Neanderthal relative in comparison.
I remember Apple suing Creative saying their menu system was a copy of Apple's when the opposite was actually the truth.
@David Frischknecht
I think that Creative sued Apple and not the opposite.
Apple lost the sue and paid 100 million to settle: www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2006/aug/23/applepays100m
Thanks for the link. I'd heard the same thing years ago. But wasn't sure if it was true or not.
I knew I wasn't crazy, I changed my inn for a ipod nano tho :)
Yes, I bought my first Creative Nomad player in 2000 and then Archos jukebox in 2001 which had more capacity for relatively small form factor, more capacity, had a tiny display to play even mp4 videos and extension port to add hardware modules like video recorder! All these before the first music only iPod came to existence!
"...vinyl records were at their prime."
Shows a shellac record.
Aaron S. Caught that too. Weird...
wonder if these guys are form Chicago? ;) lol
Shellac is a band from Steve Albini the Producer of the first few Pixies albums. ;)
@@stoyanoffice4961 shellac is a hard & brittle coating suitable for finishing furniture -- also audio discs before vinyl
@@jaixzz lmfao
At some point in our childhood we all wanted an mp3 player more than anything.
nah, a walkman.
Funny, I don't remember wanting an MP3 player in my childhood...
Not everyone is under 30 you know...:p
I didn't, but that's probably because I very rarely listen to music, and never when out and about.
I was probably one of the last people that still carried around a portable CD player when everyone was walking around with iPods. This was in 2006. Having an iPod was a status symbol. And when I got my first iPod Nano in 2007, it blew me away. It felt futuristic to have tons of CDs worth of music in this little device. I still have it today, but I have since gone with my iPod Touch, which unfortunately is going away really soon.
For me, having local music and not having to worry about a monthly payment plan is one of the many perks that I wish isn’t being killed off by greedy corporations. Now if I want a device solely for music, I have to spend almost $1000 on a new iPhone.
My first peice of portable technology was an oldish iPod when I was 12; cost me $10, wouldn't power on, turned out the battery needed charging through a non USB connection. The 3rd gen iPod (classic) was incredible, and I've been in constant pursuit of portable innovation ever since.
One minor point of contention. The internet and home computers existed in 1979, they just weren't an ubiquitous presence as they are now. The World Wide Web's invention and the computing boom of the nineties changed that. They weren't born in a vacuum. They were revolutionary improvements on systems already in use.
Not really. At the time it was arpanet that was closed network connection and gave birth to the Internet. Yes home computer's was a thing but it was very early, they started 1975 being altair 8800 first (sort of debatable fact), 1976 Apple 1 and many others started to emerge into the consumer market. But everything was really new at that time and not adopted very well.
Forged by Kimas : Check again. It was open to students and was called “Internet” after 1983.
I still have my Frontier Labs players from many years ago. Unlike most ipod, they still work. The batteries are regular AA, rather than a soldered-in proprietary battery.
What did the MP3 player say to the headphones?
..."Wassup buds?"
Not bad.
@@ColdFusion you deserve 10M subscribers
Only because MP3 can't sound good on good cans.
Headphones arent explicitly earbuds... youre trash
Should it be earphones to actually call it buds
I made an early design for an iPod without a headphone jack. Tim, where's my plane ticket?
This video was very informative and educational, Great Music and Tech History. Thanks for sharing. Keep up the good work, All the Best, DNA Askew
I found this fascinating, and posted to my friends on Facebook. I remember in mid-2000s seeing a friend with an Apple mp3 player and I was tripped out by its interface and construction. I remember when the Walkman came out in the 80s, amazing us. This seemed similar. And yet both of these lasted so short comparatively because of how quickly tech changes, and that to me is also part of the historical importance of this. My parents grew up with records, and those were there for their entire generation. Me, I have to put up with tech changes and disruptions every 10-15 years, I find that interesting.
John Browning records are still here, and sold at places as mainstream as Target
Like light bulbs, Planned Obsolescence. Those portable music devices were great for the Time. Just not as great as the transistor radio..
Less great was the CD Walkman...i was not a fan of the CD when they came out, being touted as "lasting Forever"...i knew their construction & i'm like...yeah? Nope.
& i was right...Most loose their coherency after a decade, no matter how well it is stored the powder shifts & some falls off leaving tiny holes that can't be read because Nothing is there to read..inevitable. Leaving some of us with Mountains of holographic shiny garbage. Glad i backed everything up on external HDs...& glad for the YT videos on some cool DIY creations we can make from em, lol
Okay
@Josh A i am genuinely Glad for ya...Cherish it!
To be perfectly honest..it seems only those disks We burn erode.....i have just recently checked my long forgotten stash of movies & records on CDs & see All still play except 4....loss of 4 aint bad...but..all those we burned...literal mountains of therm....unusable.
My thoughts exactly! Great call outs !
kramer used as a pawn. good job APPLE!
Its arguable if they are scamming or not, but if people actually FELT scammed by Apple, they would not continue to buy their products. Yet Apple is one of the world's most profitable companies with legions of loyal customers...maybe it would be more accurate to say Apple is good at convincing and brainwashing people into thinking their products are worth the prices they charge for them. This is something every company tries to do, but Apple seems to do better, as you said. It also doesn't change the fact that Apple has changed the market many times with their products, in particular the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. Until each of these products, the markets for said products were small to non existent, and they had significant influence in how these products look, feel, and behave after their versions of the products were released.
I agree it is a bit annoying when they get up on stage and announce a feature that has already existed for years and tout it like they are releasing a revolutionary new feature. That said, I don't agree with you that they didn't invent anything. I suppose it depends on your definition of the word 'invent', since any idea in the world would have been thought about already. Before Mac there was Xerox, before iPod there was competing players, before iPhone there were other smartphones, and before iPad there were other tablets. But its a strong argument to say none of those alternative 'first' products were a breakthrough success that created or expanded the existing market in a significant way.
If nothing else, its fair to say Apple gets credit for inventing some products because they were the first ones to have large market success with those respective products. For example, Apple invented the first mass market smartphone with a multi-touch display (note the LG Prada was not multi-touch...arguably not even mass market...).
If you want to discuss scams, try Luxottica, the sunglass maker that makes a great majority of the world's eyewear. None of the Ray Ban or Oakley products (for example) are worth $150 and up, and the marketing fluff about space age material and optics used are just tinted glass, polarization coatings, and standard materials for the frame like metal and plastic. Luxottica own Every brand sold in Sunglass Hut for example, as well as Sunglass Hut itself! They have a near-monopoly and use it to bully competitors out of business then charge exorbitant prices for their eyewear! Meanwhile, they make it seem like competition exists, and that you have a choice to buy from many different companies when you choose sunglasses or other eyewear. Sounds like something closer to a scam than what Apple does to me.
This is the first time I have watched a ColdFusion video. What an excellent production! I hugely enjoy documentary videos revealing the history of everyday objects. This is a truly quality production - informative, well-researched (no lazy references to Wikipedia), interesting and professionally produced. I also appreciated the narration : clear, coherent and succinct. Well done "ColdFusion" - keep up the good work. (Marius Gudonis, Warsaw, Poland)
7:08 What? The biggest problem with mp3 players at the turn of the century sure enough was NOT the user interface, but miserable storage capacity! Yes, the typical user interface back then WOULD have been actually unbearably crappy if there were ACTUALLY hundreds or thousands of songs to browse through... But players at the time could only store a dozen or two songs! So, it's wrong to say Apple solved any already existing problem. What they did was to provide an adequate interface for the massive storage solution they also introduced (by means of basing the player on a mechanical disk drive instead of solid state memory, of course).
Not sure this is true. Several mp3 players competed with iPod in terms of capacity: I still have Creative Labs NOMAD Zen Xtra with a 60GB hard drive, purchased in 2003. Plus, it had a replaceable hard drive, so I upgraded to 100GB, and it took 5 years for the iPod to catch up to that. Microsoft's Zune (the main competitor to Creative Labs and Apple) also had a large capacity mp3 player, as did couple other companies. Every serious music lover I knew had at least a couple mp3 players around the time iPod was released. The reason iPod beat the competition so quickly is partly due to the interface, as the video explains, but also that they looked so much prettier, and more compact for the capacity. On the other hand, the iTunes requirement prevented it from squashing the competition right away - I for one would never have switched to iTunes and iPod, and still used my Creative NOMAD even after I got an iPhone (Creative Labs sounds quality was better due to their superior DAC)
*BilisNegra relax. Cold fusion doesn't always make it right. There's not enough research you can do to know the whats and whys.*
lol I just posted almost the exact comment before reading yours
I think this guy is an Apple shill.
Depends on the player, my 2nd MP3 player was a Genexxa portable CD player that would play, of course, 650-700MB of MP3s off an ISO-9660 disc... but I'd have to use a special utility to print off a track list on paper to correspond songs to a track number(!) that would show on the player. A later Kenwood player I had worked the same way.
Then I got a Creative Nomad Jukebox, which used the interface the iPod would later adopt, minus the wheel.
Yes I like these types of videos from you! I like tech history!
There was rudimentary internet in the late 70's. My Dad talks about going on chat rooms ( for lack of a better word) back then.
That was the BBS
Thats absolutely true. They were incredibly slow and controlled environments not open to the general public however. Most of the usage took place in universities and such.
@@lvhdmya4807 Yes! I knew a SYSOP!
Yeah Internet has existed for a crazy long time, a lot of people are getting "internet" and "http" mixed up. http is what we know the internet as today but there is a long history of net use decades before http's invention
$600 for an mp3 player with 64MB of storage.
It'll be mind blowing looking back 20 years from now and viewing the iPhone X & Note 9 as very limited portable devices.
That's today's money. Adjusted for inflation.
Try adjusting other products for inflation and you'll see the the price difference isn't that bad
@@GazMatic But that's exactly the point. Through inflation our money is worth more than ever. We can buy things we could only dream of in the past.
@Gaz Yes of course.
I was pointing out that device capabilities will be a world ahead in 20 years.
@@lootbox289 I can only imagine. Augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, advanced robotics all strapped into one device maybe and who knows what else.
@Odysseus I'm excited about advanced robotics in particular simply because I'm a fan of the movie iRobot from 2004. VR, AR & AI all working in conjunction with that. Think of augmented reality support centers which are where people using VR & AR systems control the robots for all different scenarios, from industrial to domestic work. VR allowing normal people to escape into another reality for a while or for their favorite game & AI in every other device because for some reason we have this innate need to talk to our devices.
Loved the video. Always have loved these educational videos.
Love your hard work.
New stories, old stories, I love them all!
U forgot the game changer "Creative Technology" First 20gb Mp3 Player Creatve Zen Touch
Wrong. It was the excellent audio quality but totally unreliable Rio Karma in 2003. Zen touch was 2004.
The hango was the 1st Harddrive based mp3 player. It was developed by Compaq. They were to scared to market it in the US.
Thank you Kramer for the millions of iPods and iPhones that can play music today
@6:30 yes no one took it seriously because it could only hold 12 songs at 128kb/s and most people understood that this didn't give meaningful advantage over any other available tech.
Typical behaviour from Apple; they couldn't even bring themselves to reward Kramer properly, and gave him an iPod instead. What a disgusting insult. Without exception, "profit over humanity" is their sole raison d'être. Soulless, profiteering snakes. That's why I'll never buy their stuff.
Fuck that, where's my royalties? Should've lawyered up.
Boo Hoo, the world is full of people with good ideas and not enough smarts to make it happen so the people who can do it, do do it. Survival of the fittest. You don't get honored for failing, neither should you get trashed but that's naturally what happens.
@@Philjj61 I get what you're saying. I don't totally agree, there are parts of their business model that is close to extortion so maybe he should have said, "you want my testimony? That could be arranged for the right price" then you set it up for 15% of what Boost.com would get, if they won. Make it worth it to play ball. And you never have to take a call on a ladder again. Regardless Apple is all about wringing the most money out of their customers, without regard for quality or value. Microsoft is no different.
I never have.
@@Philjj61 i found the apple employee.
I remember having a Creative MuVo 128MB as my first mp3 player in 2004 :)
mnd I’ve had several portable MP3 players over the years. I had one of those. Not my favorite, but It was perfect for what I was doing at the time. I prepared legal documents for people, and was able to use it as a flash drive to bring my documents back and forth from law libraries to home, and still had enough space on it for the music I listened to on my public transit commute.
I still have mine and it works perfectly. Single AAA battery powered with drag and drop files.
I had one too.
Fascinating, I first learned of mp3 in 1995. A cousin was in a university study and they were tinkering with the format. He emailed me a couple of tracks. It wasn't until 2003 that I got my first portable player.
Wow! I'm always amazed by your great video's :)
So Apple stole the idea from it's original creator, used him in their legal defense, and never even gave him royalties for _his own idea?_ Another reason why I'm never buying an apple product.
They didn't steal anything. The original idea was merely a sketch. The technology wasn't there yet.
Correct, but it feels like they treated his in a shady manner, though technically they were within their rights. Sometimes, being technically right, doesn't equate with being morally good. I think that is what people are trying to express.
Jezza : No. The patent was run out and not renewed. Talking about it is pointless. You should never buy any tech product. All of them have the same “issues”.
Just stumbled upon this. Fascinwting history, and great production. I recently started using Squarespace myself. I will watch for any new materisl you release.
You did a great job! An all-inclusive package. Usually it is hard to find some articles which include tech aspects, historical aspects and social aspects all at one package. It is comprehensive and your way of storytelling is amusing, which makes it even more tangible. Thanks and good luck!
Dagogo I always enjoy your video's for the history lesson on technology. Thank you for your work and time doing them!
I like the new and old videos, but I was more wowed and a bit more inspired by the old videos
Same here
I am am an old time tech geek. I have just found your channel in the last few days. I have very basic outline knowledge of a lot of the topics you covered. I have seen a dozen videos on your channel in the last few days that gave me the complete story on a lot of subjects, this topic the mp3 player, the MS dos story, the iphone etc.. Great channel. Love your work.
I still have my Diamond Rio! Didn’t know it was the second MP3 player ever.😎 It would only hold about 10 songs and that was at 128k sampling rate. Still, having a player that you could run with and it didn’t skip was amazing.
I still have my MPMan and my iRiver... the iRiver is still one of the best when it comes to sound...
Marcel Analbers I still have an iRiver somewhere.
Love your videos!
I know it's a small thing, but thank you for including all of the names of the songs you use in the description.
Dagogo, this is a great video. I love computing history - having read the histories of Intel, Fairchild Semiconductor, Hewlett-Packard and Apple among others. Keep making this genre. Thanks.
That’s gotta be the biggest kick in the balls ever “Hey, here’s the idea that you created that we profited on. Here, you can have one.”
No, his patent didn't include the encoding or decoding mechanism (MP3), the distribution mechanism(iTunes), DRM (which though a pain in the ass was pivotal in getting record companies on board). He just thought of the concept of a pocket-sized digital music player, but didn't specify how any of it would work, or bother with the logistics and expense of R&D, marketing etc.
Imagine you figure out how to make a surplus generating fusion power plant. That doesn't mean everyone who's thought about fusion power before "Invented it". They vaguely conceptualized a world in which it might exist, you made it real. But it's OK to tip your hat to the people who's vision may have inspired some of your ideas.
In this case, they used him to undermine a patent troll who claimed they invented it by showing the court "No, this other guy did and had a patent back in the 1970's". And they paid him for his testimony, and gave him credit which could be a boost to his future career. Handing him a free iPod was just a gesture. "Here's the revolutionary device you envisioned 20 years ago... something that's had a greater impact on modern music than the Beatles. It's not a dream anymore, it's a real thing you can hold in your hand." That should be profoundly rewarding.
Having an dream and knowing how to realize it are two totally different things. To then both realize that dream and market it successfully is equally challenging.
To give him royalties would have massively increased the cost when the product was entering the market. Even a few cents per unit sold would have been profoundly expensive as they were basically selling the units at (and sometimes below) cost, and trying to make their profit in the iTunes store. This was a new concept in music, few record companies were on board at the time, many more were willing to take Apple to court to shut down iTunes, equating it to Napster and newsgroup piracy. To their minds, anything in "MP3" was bad because it could be shared infinitely. It was a risky move for apple. If it didn't pan out, it might have sunk the company.
However, I would have thrown the guy a hundred shares of stock. Though in fairness, if he believed in the idea of the MP3 player, he could have bought that stock, or made it a condition of his assistance to Apple in their patent lawsuit. If he didn't do that, it's kinda his own fault. That's a better option than developing the idea himself. Had he not let the patent expire, he would have needed to line up investors (who would take the majority of all profits anyway), spend years in R&D, millions of his own money or equity in the company and then had to market it under a brand name nobody had ever heard of. If he bought stock in apple, he would be invested in the idea still, but with someone else taking the majority of the risk, someone with a massive market presence, legal teams to keep the lawsuits down, who have their own manufacturing facilities... Paying $50k to buy their stock is less than what he would have to invest to start a company himself, with a massively better prospect of an ROI. Again, he doesn't know how to capitalize on his idea. He can claim to have known all along that this would be the future of music, but when his faith in the idea was tested, he failed to take that leap. Ideas are for visionaries, but money seeks the bold. Not everyone can be both of those things, just be grateful if your either of them, lol.
Joseph Miller Also an interesting fact, most sources are saying the style of the iPod design was inspired by a radio by Braun
surfitlive : While they had one or two brilliant guys inventing graphical plus mechanical user interfaces, Xerox totally messed up any real product development for these technologies. They actively decided not to use the technology and locked it away. Good that somebody did use it.
I’m not aware of any Xerox fonts. TrueType? PostScript?
surfitlive : And his patent was....gone. Happens every year to thousands of engineers. Where is your point?
Boss_Man_T :Exactly. Jules Verne invented submarines and vehicles to bring people to the moon... ;)
Old technology history in video form makes it easier to recap, than reading it in written form with heavy technology terms and nomenclature
So this video makes 'quick history recap' possible for every type or viewer.
I had two ipods and a cassette player walkman too, so it was just simpler to go along with the video.
Very complete effort! Thanks man.
I have a question about the book: Would you consider releasing an audio book narrated by you? I mean your voice is second only to Morgan Freeman's. Would love to hear you talk about technology for hours.
That would actually be amazing
We love all of your videos. Keep doing what your doing!
One of my favorite videos was the history and back story to Nikola Tesla. Fascinating! Love that guy and all he has done.
Technology history videos go great with your form of reporting and storytelling.
Video starts at 1:51
I really hate these extra commercials. And I instantly thumb it down, we already watch commercials before and in the middle of a youtube video. Well let's add one at the beginning too.
Bless.
Thank you.
Ty!
If u want to support the creator, please watch it.
Probably should've mentioned Fraunhofer ...
Am curious, what was Fraunhofer's role?
You used to have pay them for a license to use the codec, but not any more. Of course, there were always free ones. www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html
Paul Oomel invented the mp3
Great stuff! I work for the 3rd company ever to make an MP3 decoder IC (VS1001) and the first chipmaker to make their own MP3 implementation after the original Fraunhofer IIS partners. (That's my impression.. I'm not 100% sure). Anyway, if you want to do your own MP3 player today, just seek out our VS1010 chip at our forum. Hmm, one thing came to mind: actually, the MP3 was not created to make music files, it was thought to be the next gen satellite radio format. For that reason, it's really streamable! For example, MP3 doesn't have any file headers, all MP3 blocks are self contained and contain their own header, including sample rate etc. Proof: you can cat together 2 MP3 files with different sample rates and the resulting file will play ok. Because in satellite broadcasting, you cannot rely on any file header to be received - you can tune in to the station at any time and immediately start receiving, even in the middle of a song. I think this is (apart from PCM WAV) still a unique feature of the MP3 format.
ColdFusion with the throwback. 🤘
In response to your request on content, you should do whatever is interesting to you. Judging from your past content, I'm sure we will also find it interesting. Because there is a lot of competition among channels like yours to find new ideas, you cannot afford to limit yourself to one narrow avenue. Your content often has a great visionary touch added, that other channels don't have, so you shouldn't lose that. The mp3 player story was good. Apple should've given that guy a token $2 million dollar check. They could've easily afforded it. Corporate greed and selfishness...unbelievable.
You are a great TH-cam Host, thanks for the Mp3 history. I watched it with my daughter, that know knows the Legacy of the Mp3 player.
Apple trying to thrown Kamer under the bus, SHAME ON YOU APPLE!
Apple throws everyone under the bus after they're done used them, that's their style.
He should has settled for some Apple stock. Could have made him a lot of money.
MacXpert74 : But then he had no active patent anymore. He basically gave up on his “sketch” long before. As an engineer, maybe he was just satisfied that someone actually built this device. He did not need the money anyway...
loved this video. Never knew about the history of MP3 players.
Enjoyed keep doing like these
Love from India Gogo. I personally love all your videos but prefer the forward looking ones slightly more. Keep up the great work, n also, will love to read your book too, cheers.
No mention of the Creative/Apple lawsuit. Creative had an almost identical user interface prior to the announcement of the iPod which they used on their Jukebox/Nomad series..
djlobb yep. Fail. And Creative MP3 players actually play mp3s. iPods play aac files.
Youngest generations actually don´t store massive numbers of mp3s anymore. It's pure online music now. Even I (and I am in my 40s) do not listen to the massive mp3 collection I have anymore (mostly ripped from the CD collection I had back in the days) , but I do have a Deezer premium account.
S. Calabrese I’m in my late 40s and I usually listen to music just by streaming on TH-cam. Still have a turntable and records in my bedroom, though
I love tech history. I get to learn new ideas from old concepts. See how things started, how they changed, if at all, foresee where they may go. Mr. Kramer got official recognition for his invention, but with lapsed patents how can he force any of the digital media players to pay royalties? And those SSDs he was going to use were essentially a new age media taking the place of vinyl records and audio tape.
Hey! That was a great minidoc about the mp3 and the "player" (s) that made it all possible. I'm subscribed and off to find more of your vids on the history of the stuff we take for granted or just threw away for newer stuff. RIP Kramer. Sounds like something Apple would do. Too bad he didn't push for better recognition (and an ipod that actually worked.)
I do enjoy this style of historical story telling. It's actually why I like your channel that much more than any other. Keep it up man, see ya in the next one!
1:08 So you use AdBlock? Me too.
Ad revenue after Adpocalypse is shit, why would you go through the annoyances of YT ads
Ad revenue helps creators a lot, actually.
I doubt that ColdFusion blocks ads on TH-cam.
Adblock plus has been garbage after being bought out. Ublock Origin is where its at. Oh and I'm watching this from an unrooted phone... So not using a form of ad block atm
I don't. Let the websites make revenue.
@@darksidelead yes.. I also use Ublock. On mobile is view ads. No root or repacked special apps.
And who knows, that the MP3 is a german invention?
The video is about the player not the music format.
@@McRambro : The video stated that MP3 was the key technology behind these players. If it makes a false or "incomplete" statement on this key factor, it leaves a strange taste.
www.mp3-history.com
www.mp3-history.com/en/timeline.html
FRANCE THOMSON COMPANY
Maybe do a video about how Nokia might have had a modern style smartphone several years before Apple's iPhone, if they had only listened to a Finish inventor, who showed an early working prototype of such a device with touchscreen, swiping, scroling & internet connection as well as other features to the Nokia board members already in 2002?
They thought it was an interesting concept, but didn't want to develop his idea any further - having invested fortunes in designs of their own (akward) OS, loads of classic mobile designs with keyboards and production lines for such mobiles etc. - , so they only gave him 5 minutes for his sales pitch and didn't even really get to play around with his mysterious new "smartphone" with its magic touch screen.
Some people just can't see a great idea, even it hits them right between the eyes, and unfortunately they far too often sit as board members in big companies and want everything to remain the same more or lesd, even when their systems, technology and designs will very soon be obsolete - because they simply can't bring themselves to admit this.
If they had just had some teenagers present to react to and play with this new phone type alongside their own classical types & designs, they would have had no doubt which way things would be moving rapidly. 😉
Check out BBC's "The Rise & Fall of Nokia" ( ca. 42 mins in )
This is a great video! I really enjoyed it. Thanks again.
For some reason even though you are the only channel i have the bell on, youtube wont send me notification i think they don’t want me to watch your videos.
One of the idiots at my local Apple store from the Genius bar once told me while I was looking at iPods.. The guy told me that Apple invented the MP3 player and everyone else copies them.. I died laughing in his face as I walked out..
Lol... yeah, if people know someone's a "Genius" because it says so on their name tag, which they're required to wear to a $12/hr part-time job at a shopping mall, that person should probably just keep their mouth shut, so as not to break the illusion.
r/thathappened
Well...Apple may not have invented the MP3 Player but they definitely perfected it. He's right about one thing though - everyone copies the iPod or based their design on something that did(looking at you Android)
@@johnrickard8512 Says you.. iSheep.. By your logic every car is a copy of the other because it has 4 wheels, doors and an engine.
LOL owned
Archos Jukebox was released in 2000 (before the iPod) and it featured a huge improvement in navigation. So no, the iPod wasn't the first to address this issue.
I remember when Napster first came out I had two 1 gig hard drives full of music and back then that was a lot. It was an amazing time.
My brother saved money from his part-time job and bought a tdk 1x cd burner for our windows 98 pc. We were probably the only ones at our school with a cd burner. It was very slow, but it changed our lives lol. We were able to download songs/albums on napster that weren't released in our state, yet, and burn them to cd. We felt super cool lmao
Yup and also had a Super Wild Card, copying SNES games and downloading/trading them on various BBSs.
jpablo700 now that’s amazing and to me still is crazyyyy! Good job bro!
This video gave a very good historical perspective into MP3 format and devices.
How about doing a video on computer storage devices and media from early 3rd generation computers like PDP-11 and VAX systems running with Card readers, tape drives and then disk drums and then to early IBM PCs using 360 KB Floppy disks and 10 MB Hard drives.
Thanks
Not renewing that patent has to be the second biggest business blunder in history
I still have my old MP3 players and they are still working 😁
And yes, this kinda of videos is what got me into your channel.. this and the and 'How big is...' series..
Good luck mate
I'd still happily use an iPod nano for music if there was a good way to download music now since youtube shut down all the mp3 download sites
Jeez, they could of given the guy a mil or 2.
There is absolutely no way Krammer could have made his version of an MP3 player.
The mp3 format, jut as all mp formats are proprietary formats which he had no access to. The mp3 format was hacked and exploited by the music pirating industry, which is why we have the format available today. No music company could have used it until it was declared lost in court, then several manufacturers offered mp3 players, until Apple's ipod player allowed the format on its players. Apple claiming that Krammer was the inventor is just an excuse to get out of the legal bind it was in.
All apple gave the inventor was a lousy iPod, wow there so mean.
What is even sadder is that it broke in less than a year!
And a T shirt :)
I thought ipod was the only good innovation done by apple. Now I know that was also stolen.
It was inevitable for the mp3 player to be made. The walkman already existed, even portable record players before that.
Most of Apples innovation is in rethinking a existing concept and making it into a more useable one. As mentioned in this video, the earlier MP3 players were clunky to use and had very limited storage. Apple re-imagined the concept and made it into a easy to use and much more powerful device that people did want to use. The previous players didn't really offer much over a CD-walkman with their limited flash storage. But the mini hard disk that Apple put into the player all of a sudden made it into a product that allowed you to take a large collection of songs with you in your pocket. So yes, it *was* a innovative product, although it wasn't the first MP3 player.
There were HDD-based players on the market but they were big, using 2.5" drives. One thing Jobs did right was securing early batches of 1.8" drives.
Apple never invented, only re-imagined & capitalized. Just like Disney & Thomas Edison.
A Frenchman came up with a car in the 1700's. Now you know that was also stolen.
Great content every time, love all of your videos!!
amazing content!!!!!!! keep it up i will be buying the book aswell 100% support
Lovely material.. Love all your thorough research and the calm voice.. Keep it blazing
Deplorable treatment of a true visionary innovator. Literally the richest company on earth couldn’t give more than lip service to Kramer.
My guess is Apple hands were tied as paying a large amount of money would be considered as bribing a witness.
Kane Kramer's net worth is over $230,000,000.00 U.S., so maybe check your priorities, kid
they weren't "literally the richest company on earth" back then. this was when they first made the ipod. apple was little more than an obscure computer company.
A vision is not enough if you don't have a compressed format to store the data.
Not really rest to sure he got paid off the technology didn’t exist at the time that we came up the idea so I have to wait for a company in technology to catch up. The patent had already expired
Don’t stop doing videos on the history of tech ... this is my main reason to follow you...
A tiny cassette lol!!! You mean modern external memory
To make it easy for everyone to visualize for people then I think. Most people then knew what a cassette was
MP3: "Sounds similar to CD quality"
FLAC: I about to end this man's career
I still buy cds so I can get the WAV files. I know mp3 has come a long way, but wav is closer to studio quality. You can especially hear the difference when muting the mid/mono, and listening to the side/stereo. Mp3 has a compressed watery sound. Wav is perfect.
I'm one of the few people who still use an iPod. It's a last gen Classic and I love it for its storage capacity and that it does just what it's supposed to, and so far with no sign of battery degradation. I love being able to carry my (obscure) music library around with no need to be connected.
Uhm ... wait a minute! You do all that research but you forget to mention that the mp3 format was developed at a university in Germany by engineers such as Karlheinz Brandenburg?
Un Fug also failed to mention that iPod essentially copied the Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox which came first
Both Napster and Diamond MP3 players fundamentally changed music industry as we know it today. Kudos to Kramer.
I would argue that phones supporting Mp3 songs were what killed the Mp3 player, not the iPod. The ipod merely stuck around longer since it housed a lot more songs and sold better due to good marketing.
3:24 "vinyl records were at their prime" but shows and non vinyl records on on a wind-up gramophone with low fidelity
No, that’s definitely a vinyl record.
@@lineialquantum Yes, it is shellec. Looks like a 20s Columbia record.
When MP3 was new thing, home computers were so slow, that you had to leave computer on for night to convert some music CD -> MP3.
Mika Korhonen I remember those days. I would actually rip a few CDs to wav files, and then when I left for work, start a batch file that would convert them to mp3s while I was gone.
The Creative Nomad could also manage large libraries.
iTunes and Microsoft made iPod successful, not the click wheel.
It's only when Apple made the deal to sell songs for 1$ via iTunes, made iTunes available on Windows and made iPod connect via USB, not FireWire, things took off.
Before that, iPod was struggling.
I like CDs and cassette tapes vhs tapes and DVDs and I still use them to
X
Apple make me sick they gave him a ipod
Disgusting company.
You can believe he got a lot more than that he does had a confidentiality agreement He probably end up getting millions
Eve should have known. Eating the fruit of the Apple, as in Genesis, screwed things up and it's never been the same since!
I can testify to the "breaks after 8 months" part.
What a greedy company Apple is !! This man deserved royalties, just so much more than a damn' ipod.
Dude most anything you do is interesting! All the topics subjects in content is on point and awesome
Is the Sony Walkman not part of this history?
I just bought a Sony Digital Walkman a few months ago. Significantly better audio quality than iPods but you can't create a playlist prior to adding music & you have to get an SD card to expand how much music it holds, so kinda pricey.
Good work discovering that the Sony Walkman is a cassette player. 👏👏👏👏👏
5:13
I just bought a Sony *Digital* Walkman
www.sony.com/electronics/walkman-digital-music-players/t/walkman
takes 5 sec of googling bud.
*_5:28_*