Blast from the Past: iTunes 1
As Billy Joel said in "Keeping the Faith", it seems like "I've been lost in let's remember" when I recently stumbled across this review of iTunes 1 by Daniel Chvatik of atpm.com. How far we've come.
iTunes 1, which worked on all Apple systems released August 1998 or later required OS 9.0.4 to run. It had playlists. The ability to burn CDs. That trippin' visualizer thing that created pretty pictures out of your music. It even had the browse icon. You know the one. It looks like an "eye". Lets you browse by album and artist and all? It's the single biggest feature that people who complain about iTunes are looking for and then they get all surprised that it has been there since version 1 of the thing. Version one even supported CDDB Gracenotes.
It's amusing to see the list of supported hardware players: Nakamichi SoundSpace 2, Nomad II & II MG, Nomad Jukebox, Nike psa-play 60 & 120, and Rio 500, 600 & 800. Notice anything missing? Huh, huh? After all, this was almost 3 years before the iPod. Er, after all, this was probably about 6-9 months before the iPod.
Another thing that made me chuckle in the article was the disappointed mention that you couldn't "skin" iTunes. Man, how times have changed. Not!
If this story tickled your fancy, you'll probably want to also check out TUAW's previous iTunes from 0 to 7.0 overview and history of the iTunes icon.
