Touching the back wall of the Apple store

I wonder if it was the Creative Nomad [1] ... I had a Jukebox that had a 6GB spinning disk in it originally. Upgrading to a 20GB drive was the first real hackery thing I did with my old RedHat box. I had to buy an IDE converter too to move between the laptop connector to the desktop.

That was also when I learned what happens if you dd a Creative Nomad Jukebox system image onto your root partition while the machine is running. The RedHat install stayed stable for about 20 minutes before weird things started failing and eventually the whole thing just locked up. Remember kids, always check you dd out file path!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Nomad

Looks like the 5th gen Ipod was the thing in 2005/2006, per wikipedia. Sounds like I graduated HS +/- a year or two of the author.

In that time frame... I was using sub-GB MP3 players, with MMC cards or maybe SD cards by that point. (I didn't have those massive multi-thousand song collections, so it was fine...)

Because I have pics saved in my personal folder, mine in high school/early college were:

- Classic 64MB w/ 128 MB memory card

- MPIO FL100, probably 2 or 3x bigger; I wore this on a belt holder

- Sandisk Sansa, the bulbous one, before later using some of the smaller ones. Probably still only 256 or 512 MB of built-in storage.

My first MP3 player was the Creative MuVo. The storage part (actually, really everything but the battery holder) you could disconnect and use as a USB stick, which was also how you loaded music onto it. I (correctly) thought this was very cool.

I eventually did get an iPod, the one that was all capacitive touch buttons and wheel, the last one before the click wheel.

I loved my SanDisk Sansa. It had a specific category for audiobooks, and there were a lot of quality of life things - features that wouldn’t matter when you were listening to songs but that made listening to books on tape way better.

- If you held the fast forward button it would slowly increase the speed it fast forwarded. Not something that matters with a 2 minute song, but it really matters with an hour long audiobook section.

- If you went to listen to something else but then you came back to the audiobook, it would open with the section you’d been listening to highlighted, and if you selected it it would pick up where you’d left off. If you accidentally skipped forward you could back out, move back to the previous section, and it’d do the same thing - starting where you’d been.

- On top of that, you could add more storage with microSD cards!

It can’t be the Nomad. “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame”

I have never seen a nomad and I know that line. The nomad was famous for it as far as I am concerned.

2005 is when I got a second-hand Sony Ericsson K750 phone that had been reflashed to the W800 Walkman phone firmware (the hardware was the same) and I started using my phone as my MP3 player. It was also my only usable digital camera (the other one was one of those terrible cheap RAM-based ones, and this had a really decent 2MP shooter). Really that device delineated the beginning of the convergence era for me.

The other thing that was great about the MuVo music players is that they all had tactile controls. I used to listen with them while riding my bicycle, and I could operate mine in any way I needed to with it still in my pocket: repeating a track, skipping a track, changing albums, toggling shuffle, etc.

my son still occasionally uses my 20 year old Sansa in his car.