The MP3 player is ten years old this month. The first commercially released personal music player capable of handling MP3 files was the MPMan F10, manufactured by Korea’s Saehan Information Systems and launched in March 1998.
The F10 contained 32MB of Flash storage, enough for a handful of songs encoded at 128Kb/s. It measured 91 x 70 x 165.5mm. It connected to an old-style parallel port on the host PC from which songs could be copied to the player.
I remember downloading my first MP3 file thinking it was something similar to a midi file. Then I couldn’t find anything to play it because winamp wasn’t in existence. Finally I found a German utility called Musearc. Then I played the file and could not believe it was the real song!