The other day I remembered the MP3 player my parents purchased for me when I was in high school. My dad was a teacher and my mother was a stay-at-home mom, and since they were raising four children money was always tight. That is to say, I did not get an iPod.

I wasn’t able to remember the name of the device so I made an artistic rendition to see if that would jog my memory:

I then did some sleuthing, and with some luck found the exact model I used to own being sold on eBay!

So I bought it.

As you can see from my artistic rendering, my memory of this thing had some… mistakes.

Anyway it uses a AAA battery and has needs micro USB port to connect to a computer:

When you connect it to the computer, it becomes unusable. Upon disconnecting, it reconstructs the music library before becoming usable again:

The device can only hold 512MB. A highly quality rip of the Kill la Kill OST takes half of that space.

The device has a switch to disable any input. I have many memories of putting the thing in my pocket and then pressing the pause button by mistake. So there is a definite need for that functionality.

The microphone, on the other hand, is a very strange inclusion. Turns out that the device can record your voice and store it! This charms me greatly.

I am quite delighted to have this little relic of history in my possession, and I look forward to hooking it up to the aux in my car and playing Blumenkranz at concerningly loud volumes :)