One of the more functionally useful designs for an MP3 player came from Creative’s MuVo line, which debuted in 2002. And with just 32MB of storage onboard, it wouldn’t take long to tire of listening to the same four songs and again. The WMP1 relied on a proprietary docking station to connect it to a PC, and a separate proprietary adaptor for connecting headphones to it.

Copying music files to your smartwatch now is an effortlessly wireless affair, but in the early aughts, it was far more challenging. Casio, known for putting everything from calculators to PDAs into its digital watches, realised the best MP3 player is the one you already have with you, and the WMP1 would be literally strapped to your wrist all day long. The evolution of MP3 players was startlingly fast, and it didn’t take long at all for weird iterations to arrive. It was by no means a tiny MP3 player, but it featured a generously sized screen for the time, and its rechargeable battery was boosted through 12MB of DRAM, which allowed about 12 minutes of music to be cached so the player’s hard drive could be engaged less often. The PJB-100, licensed to and sold by South Korea’s HanGo Electronics, could hold around 100 CDs worth of music (1,200+ songs) and transferred music from a PC using the newer USB port interface instead of parallel port, which would have taken ages to move across a large MP3 collection. This player traded expensive flash memory for a 2.5-inch laptop hard drive with a capacity of 4.86GB. Limited capacities were a big issue with the earliest MP3 players, but that would be solved in 1999 when Compaq Research and the Palo Alto Advanced Development group designed and developed the Personal Jukebox PJB-100. If you’re wondering how music fans survived on just 32MB of storage in an MP3 player in 1998, you’re not alone.

Winamp classic