Get Nostalgic With This Quiz on the History of Music Players

In 1931, the first commercially available 12-inch vinyl record was released and featured Beethoven’s "Symphony No. 5 In C Minor" by the Philadelphia Orchestra. While t new technology to create flat records on polyvinyl chloride (PVC) was transformative for the music industry, this first foray was a commercial failure; at the time, few people owned phonographs able to play vinyl.

In 1979, the very first Walkman was designed for Sony’s co-founder Masaru Ibuka after he expressed a desire to be able to listen to opera while flying. The prototype was such a success that commercially produced Walkmans went on sale shortly after and sold for $150. The first Walkmans were made of aluminum and came in silver or blue. Later they were made from black plastic and made into various other colors, most notably yellow.

Early music players such as the phonograph worked by playing sound back from the indentations on a wax cylinder, but these were prone to breaking. In 1894, American inventor Emile Berliner developed the gramophone which could play music back from a flat, round record. These discs, made from shellac, could play music continuously for up to four minutes, which was a huge feat at that time.

In 1963, the first compact cassettes and cassette players were released by Phillips. Each side had 45 minutes of music, which made longer albums possible. However, you had to physically flip the tape over to play the other side. In-car stereos changed this by introducing auto-reverse in the 1970s, which meant you could listen to a whole album seamlessly without taking your eyes off the road.

The iPod was not the first digital mp3 player but the most successful by a wide margin. The device got its name after a freelance copywriter, on seeing the prototype, immediately thought of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and the line “Open the pod bay door, Hal!” The first iPod was 5GB, cost $399, and could hold up to 1,000 songs, which allowed users to store almost their whole record collection on one small device.

In 1964, the 8-track was first introduced as the Lear Jet Stereo 8 by the jet airplane manufacturer of the same name Unlike the common cassette tape, which had two sides, an 8-track held four different “programs” with typically two songs apiece. A listener had to physically toggle between programs on the player, which led to a less than ideal listening experience and often caused albums to be listened to out of sequence.

In 1979, Phillips introduced the CD, or compact disc, at a press conference. Before settling on "compact disc," the names Mini Racks, MiniDisc, and CompactRack were tossed around for the new technology. The first mass-produced CD album was ABBA’s "The Visitors" and the first commercially available CD player was released in Japan in 1982.

In 1948, Columbia Records introduced the long-playing (LP) record. The new vinyl had very fine grooves and a rotational speed of 33 1/3 RPM, which gave 23-minutes of playing time per side. The 12-inch LP soon became the standard format for commercial records. LPs could play for six times longer than earlier shellac records, which allowed symphonies and concertos to be featured on a single record.

Thomas Edison received a patent for the phonograph on February 19, 1878. It was the first device that could record sound and then play it back. After a series of experiments and collaborations, Edison managed to convert the vibrations caused by sound onto a point that embossed them onto a foil-wrapped cylinder that captured the sound for playback.

In 1969, large, portable cassette players with multiple speakers were launched by Phillips. They soon became a huge craze, allowing anyone, especially young people, to play music (usually at high volume and with pumping bass) wherever they went. These chunky portable cassette players soon became known as "boomboxes" due to their boxy shape and were heavily associated with breakdancers in the 1980s.