http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03/10/ft_first_mp3_player/

Commercial portable MP3 players have now been on the market for 10 years, with the first being credited to the MPMan F10.

I always thought the PMP300 was the first on the market. Man, I wanted that so bad.

Not only do I still have one, but we still use it regularly. I have an audiobook-ish tour of amsterdam loaded in it, and give it to our guests who want to check out Amsterdam...

I wanted to correct you and say that it was actually the PJB-100 .
But the PJB-100 was actually the first hard disk based portable digital music player.

Which is still a pretty cool milestone.

And we're about to hit the decade mark to its development start date -- still another year and a half until we celebrate its First Ship.

Time flies.

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.

There is always the main empeg.com site for a general 1999 reference, or the article Hugo wrote a while back for the geek site that moved to Riocar.org. There are also multiple Slashdot stories as well.

I had posted images of the empeg units to the specific empeg wiki pages a while back, but they were pulled down due to not citing rights to use them.

I had a feeling that anything written by Hugo probably wouldn't be citeable and none of the slashdot stories actual say when the first one shipped.

I guess all us early Mk1 buyers could scan our invoices a put them online

Hmm, this is probably a decent source placing the mk1 in early 1999 (the story is in february) and empeg as having started in 1998:

http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG19990205S0016

EEtimes is probably good enough to cite... it is kinda annoying that the past is rewritten constantly with wikipedia and people take it as gospel!

Hugo

Isn't that how history works?

Mmm.. great article link, Hugo. That may come in handy for a workshop I'll likely be presenting at the Ottawa Linux Symposium this summer --> a detailed/hands-on look at embedded Linux on the empeg!

Cheers

and a piccy of the first ever display extender too...

Yes, but I imagine his services are limited to a small area.

He might get tired running next to the car, too.

Awww, he looks so young!

ROFLMAO

My next-door neighbour took the picture... I don't think that lone rev 2 PCB unit had actually been installed at that point either, so posing *by* the car was sorta the best option

Hugo