The digital audio player

It’s hard to imagine a world without digital music players, but it was a British inventor that got there first. In 1979, Kane Kramer came up with the idea of a digital audio player known as the IXI. This player was the size of a credit card with a small mono LCD screen and navigation and control buttons. It was designed to use bubble memory, although its 8MB capacity was capable of storing only around three-and-a-half minutes of audio. However, Kramer correctly postulated that storage capacities would massively increase. In addition to the player, Kramer also proposed a digital download service over telephone lines to let people get the music they wanted, when they wanted it. A patent was awarded in 1985 in the UK and 1987 in the US. Sadly, the product wasn’t to be a success. After failing to raise £60,000 to renew the patent, the design entered the public domain, and other companies were free to do their own thing. In 2008, Apple called Kramer as a witness to defend itself against charges of patent infringement for the iPod, citing the IXI as prior art.