On the subject of MP3 player history, the empeg has been pretty much stripped from history of MP3 players on wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3_player

It was mentioned on that page in the past and I updated the page a few times when it had the wrong shipping date listed (they had it listed as a year after we had our hands on the first players). But I never had anything reliable to cite with the date so it kept getting reverted.
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Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday