27 Jun
2007
27 Jun
'07
7:35 p.m.
At 8:04 AM +0100 6/27/07, Rob wrote:
Almost on topic(only a year to go), I've somewhere
still got my old
Diamond Rio PMP 300 mp3 player - One of the first available; certainly
around here. Came with a massive 32MB internal memory (but could take
an additional 32MB Smartmedia card but I never had one). Cost me best
part of ?100 new. ($200). I pretty much stopped using it when I
upgraded the Windows PC as the drivers were Win95 only - parallel port
interface - and didn't work under NT.
Actually I'm not sure what the stance is on
peripherals, but if it was a computer it likely
would be fully on topic. IIRC, it was the first
commercially available MP3 player, at least it
was the first widely available one.
I bought one new as well, though I paid $300 and
got it when it first came out. I was able to get
almost a half hour of music on it. Minidisc's
made more sense at the time. In fact I finally
gave up on Minidiscs at work this last Christmas
when I received a iPod from my Mom.
I actually had my Rio working with WinXP at one
point, and I believe I also had it working with
Linux. While it can handle very low bitrate
audio (I have some spoken word MP3's that cram 30
minutes of audio into about 3Mb), it seems to
have a hard limit of two hours audio.
I still have the original box, and should have
everything that goes with it. My intention is
that one day it will be a museum exhibit along
with a lot of my other computer equipment, that
is the only thing it has ever been good for.
Personally I wish I'd never wasted the $300 on it.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
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| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |