MPMan

Saehan MPMan F10, 1998 Before the Rio got the headlines, a South Korean company got there first. Saehan launched the F10 in March 1998, and it is widely credited as the first commercially released portable player that could handle MP3 files. It held 32MB of flash memory, enough for only a handful of songs at 128Kb/s, and loaded them over a PC's parallel port. In the U.S. it sold for $250, later $200. Nothing moved, so nothing skipped, and that is the real breakthrough here: music as a file rather than a physical thing you had to carry.