Happy 10th Birthday, MP3 Player!

That's right folks, this month is the ten year anniversary of the MP3 player!

Can you believe it? In March 1998, the first publicly available, commercial MP3 player was released by Saehan Information Systems: the MPMan F10.

The MPMan F10 had this awesome list of features:

• 32MB Flash storage!
• 91 x 70 x 165.5mm dimensions! (for those of you that don't know metric... that's pretty thick)
• Parallel port interface! (remember, USB didn't make it big until after September of 1998)
• Tiny LCD screen!

The price? $200-250.

We've certainly come a long way in a decade.

So as you walk down the street swiping and pinching at your iPod Touch screens, let's take a moment to remember those clunky old players of yesteryear, for opening up the market that now lets us enjoy our music libraries on the go.

Hit the link for a bit more background story on the release of this gadget pioneer, and its eventual defeat at the hands of Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP300 - infamous for being sued by the RIAA.

Ten years old: the world's first MP3 player [Register Hardware]