Synthesis Studios

Sometimes you don’t really notice or appreciate technical progress until you stop and take a look back at where we came from. That’s how my iPod shuffle earned itself a little extra respect today when, as I shuffled through boxes of old electronics in an effort to organize the lab, I stumbled upon a little piece of history. In a box labeled ‘Audio Hardware’ I found three historic Sony artifacts of the late 90’s — a DAT (Digital Audio Tape) WalkMan, a ‘DiscMan’ portable CD player, and a MiniDisk WalkMan, complete with a MiniDisk library of quality 90’s tracks. The whole thing got me a little reminiscent of the good old days when we all had cassette players strapped to our waistbands, and inspired me to do a little Wikipedia research on the history of music storage media.

1877 — Thomas Edison builds the first phonograph
1963 — Philips introduces the audio cassette in Europe
1982 — Philips produces first Compact Disc in Germany
1998 — Flash and Hard Drive based MP3 players emerge
2001 — Apple releases the first generation iPod

It’s hard to believe that less than twenty years ago we were listening to New Kids on the Block and Milli Vanilli on cassette tapes; it’s even harder to believe we ever listened to those guys at all.

Remember all the fun of untangling seven feet of plastic ribbon after it was sucked out of your favorite tape into the hungry mouth of your car cassette player? And that nice garbled sound you got after you finally managed to stuff the wrinkled remains back in? I loved that. It’s hard to believe that less than twenty years ago we were listening to New Kids on the Block and Milli Vanilli on cassette tapes; it’s even harder to believe we ever listened to those guys at all.

The small steps we take to get from point A to point B often don’t look very revolutionary when viewed through a narrow window, but when the taken several decades at a time they really become quite remarkable. Now I’m going to sit back and bask in the nostalgia of my newly found minidisk library.