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Timing is most important... too early, flop. Too late, flop.
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I'm confused about the patent renewal problem.
He got the patent in 1981 and then the 'same year' Paul McCartney pays to renew them?
And then apparently in 1988 he's supposed to renew them again and doesn't have the money.
What's the story here?
The man who nearly invented the iPod two decades ago let it slip through his fingers along with a fortune worth millions.I'll bet the sound quality was just staggering back then. /sarc
The other Bill Gates. Software genius Gary Kildall invented the first operating system for PCs in the early Seventies but missed out on supplying IBM because he went flying instead of meeting company bosses. Bill Gates later sold IBM the MS-DOS system.Actually, the way I heard the story, the IBM people were over an hour late for the meeting regarding CP/M, and Kildall went sailboarding. CP/M interrupts were legacies within DOS up to 5.0 (read that in one of those inside DOS type books).
By 1986, the IXI could store 5 minutes of music...MP3s store about one minute in a megabyte. I recall the cost of RAM in 1986, and it wasn't cheap -- 5 megabytes of RAM would have cost a small fortune, and the box would have been pretty big. That's what doomed the design.
Cool, except that the mp3 algorithms weren't invented until 1992.