Kane Kramer: ahead of his time.
Do you know about Kane Kramer? Ever heard of him? I hadn't, and neither had Eric, who is a champion Hearer About Things, so that was a good indicator that a lot of you might not have heard of him, either.
Kane Kramer invented something that you probably have in your bag or your pocket, that goes with you wherever you go...but he invented it twenty years before anybody had heard of it.
This is the pencil sketch from Kane Kramer's patent application for the IXI Digital Audio Player. Remind you of anything? Something that starts with the letter "i" and ends in the letter "Pod?"
Kane Kramer applied for his patent in 1981.
Lemme say that again. 1981.
My parents still had some reel-to-reel music recordings in freaking 1981. The eight-track was still kicking in 1981. And here's this guy inventing a digital audio player at a time when the tech world hadn't quite internalized the idea of a machine without moving parts. Microprocessors were in their infancy. Digital? It was an analog world back then. But look at that sketch! It's totally recognizable! That shit even has a clickwheel-like thing, yo.
The IXI was the size of a credit card and had an LCD screen. Okay, it only had 8M of memory, about 3.5 minutes of audio. But consider the state of technology at the time. The notion of a personal computer was in its infancy. The first personal computer, the Commodore PET, came on the market in 1977. The Apple II was the height of high-tech. In the early 1980s, you could expect to pay a couple hundred bucks for a lousy 128K of memory. At those rates, the now-stingy 5G of memory in the very first iPod would have cost four million dollars. The basic tech of the iPod had been invented by 1981 but it wasn't advanced enough to make the player feasible.
Regardless, Kramer had a lot of interest in his player and a lot of orders. But then some kind of shakeup in his company caused him to be unable to renew his patent and the design went into the public domain.
Here's what blows my mind. Kramer envisioned adding music files to the IXI over the phone lines. There was no Internet in 1981. To us the concept of downloading is a natural as breathing, but at the time it wasn't part of the language.
I hear the cynics saying "Oh, I bet Apple tries to hush him up and ignores his contribution." Sorry, but they don't. In fact in 2007 Apple recognized Kramer as the progenitor of the modern iPod and made him some kind of emeritus consultant. He's still working in the tech field, although his recent projects sound a bit creepily Big Brotherish.
Did I mention that Kramer was 23 when he applied for this patent? What the fuck have I been doing with my life, anyway?
I'm just always impressed by people who envision things that later came to pass far ahead of their time. It reminds me of The Mother of All Demos, as it's referred to, which was a presentation given in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart in which he presented the first mouse and demonstrated hypertext, video conferencing, email, instant messaging and interactive text decades before they became realities.
Kane Kramer invented something that you probably have in your bag or your pocket, that goes with you wherever you go...but he invented it twenty years before anybody had heard of it.
This is the pencil sketch from Kane Kramer's patent application for the IXI Digital Audio Player. Remind you of anything? Something that starts with the letter "i" and ends in the letter "Pod?"
Kane Kramer applied for his patent in 1981.
Lemme say that again. 1981.
My parents still had some reel-to-reel music recordings in freaking 1981. The eight-track was still kicking in 1981. And here's this guy inventing a digital audio player at a time when the tech world hadn't quite internalized the idea of a machine without moving parts. Microprocessors were in their infancy. Digital? It was an analog world back then. But look at that sketch! It's totally recognizable! That shit even has a clickwheel-like thing, yo.
The IXI was the size of a credit card and had an LCD screen. Okay, it only had 8M of memory, about 3.5 minutes of audio. But consider the state of technology at the time. The notion of a personal computer was in its infancy. The first personal computer, the Commodore PET, came on the market in 1977. The Apple II was the height of high-tech. In the early 1980s, you could expect to pay a couple hundred bucks for a lousy 128K of memory. At those rates, the now-stingy 5G of memory in the very first iPod would have cost four million dollars. The basic tech of the iPod had been invented by 1981 but it wasn't advanced enough to make the player feasible.
Regardless, Kramer had a lot of interest in his player and a lot of orders. But then some kind of shakeup in his company caused him to be unable to renew his patent and the design went into the public domain.
Here's what blows my mind. Kramer envisioned adding music files to the IXI over the phone lines. There was no Internet in 1981. To us the concept of downloading is a natural as breathing, but at the time it wasn't part of the language.
I hear the cynics saying "Oh, I bet Apple tries to hush him up and ignores his contribution." Sorry, but they don't. In fact in 2007 Apple recognized Kramer as the progenitor of the modern iPod and made him some kind of emeritus consultant. He's still working in the tech field, although his recent projects sound a bit creepily Big Brotherish.
Did I mention that Kramer was 23 when he applied for this patent? What the fuck have I been doing with my life, anyway?
I'm just always impressed by people who envision things that later came to pass far ahead of their time. It reminds me of The Mother of All Demos, as it's referred to, which was a presentation given in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart in which he presented the first mouse and demonstrated hypertext, video conferencing, email, instant messaging and interactive text decades before they became realities.