{"id":590,"date":"2006-10-13T00:38:45","date_gmt":"2006-10-13T04:38:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scaredpoet.com\/wordpress\/?p=590"},"modified":"2006-10-13T16:17:39","modified_gmt":"2006-10-13T20:17:39","slug":"the-prehistoric-ipod","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/?p=590","title":{"rendered":"The Prehistoric iPod"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RooPaq\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You’re looking at what was the State of the Art in portable hard drive-based MP3 players, before Apple finally released the iPod in late 2001. Meet the Genica RooPaq<\/a>. Essentially, it was little more than a 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure, with a USB interface, two-line LCD text-only<\/strong> display, a battery and the bare minimum chipset needed to play MP3 audio files. It came with exactly zero bytes of disk space; the idea was that you could open the unit up and install a laptop hard drive of “any size,” and you could then dictate how much space you wanted the player to have. The cost? $299 plus the cost of the hard drive.
\nIt was released shortly after rumors began surfacing of Apple’s pending entry into the music player market, and I imagine its manufacturer wanted to get a head start in order to beat Apple at its own game. They probably thought they had a winner, too. Why would anyone pay $500 for an overpriced iPod when for almost a quarter of the price less you could have something that does the same thing?<\/p>\n

And I agreed. A full summer before the original iPod<\/a> debuted, I bought a RooPaq off eBay. It was a bit larger than a brick, and came about as close in weight. With the 20GB hard drive I installed constantly spinning when powered up, the player had a then-impressive 1.5 to 2 hours of run time between charges. There was no slick iTunes-like interface to manage content; the method of transfer was simple drag-and-drop of the files through a connected computer’s operating system. Yes, it was The Shit. And as I lugged this beast around with me, I too thought “what is Apple thinking? No one is going to buy an iPod when they can have one of these!”<\/p>\n

Then I got to see an iPod on display. Marvelled at its tiny size and 10-hour battery life, stood agog at its elegantly simple yet effective interface,<\/a> and realized that sometimes looks are<\/strong> everything. And I knew I had been robbed.<\/p>\n

Well, not really robbed.<\/em> No matter how great the interface was, I still fresh out of college and quite broke at the time. Barely able to justify the RooPaq’s expense, there was no way I could shell out $500 for a simple mp3 player, no matter how good the features. But I did save my pennies for the day when I could<\/em> get one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’re looking at what was the State of the Art in portable hard drive-based MP3 players, before Apple finally released the iPod in late 2001. Meet the Genica RooPaq. Essentially, it was little more than a 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure, with a USB interface, two-line LCD text-only display, a battery and the bare minimum […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gadgets-widgits-and-whatzits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}