Apple Admits Brit Invented iPod — In 1979

by Eric March on September 7, 2008 at 10:04 pm

The year was 1979.  Alien and Apocalypse Now were top box office hits. The Knack’s My Sharona and Rod Stewart’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy were topping the music charts. The Ayatollah Khomeini returned from 15 years of exile to sieze power in Iran and created a major hostage crisis while it snowed in the Sahara desert for 30 minutes and the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant experienced a partial meltdown in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, in Britain, a 23-year-old Kane Kramer invented, and patented, the iPod.

It wasn’t called iPod, of course; he called it IXI. It was a credit-card-sized personal audio player (thicker, obviously), featured a rectangular landscape LCD screen above a set of transport and menu buttons and it could hold a staggering 3.5 minutes of music. Sound impractical? Naturally, but he was prescient enough to understand that capacities would increase with time as technology advanced and prices decreased.

Unfortunately, the company that he had set up to develop the idea suffered a boardroom split in 1988. After that, Kane failed to raise the £60,000 (approx. US $94,000 1988 dollars) needed to renew the worldwide patents that spanned 120 countries, and so the concept and technology fell into the public domain.

All of this is coming to light now as documents filed by Apple regarding a court case wherein Apple was sued by Burst.com for alleged patent infringements — a case that Apple filed to have dismissed, and who were eventually granted that motion. It turns out that Apple’s defense was in large part predicated upon revealing the conceptual device that inspired The Steve to create the iconic iPod in the first place: The IXI, thus forever enshrining poor Mr. Kramer as one of the unluckiest people in the world — next to the guy who changed his mind about sinking some money into Microsoft’s IPO in 1986.

Nevertheless, Apple tapped Kane, who was atop a ladder doing a bit of house painting at the time, to come visit them in Cupertino as a consultant and maybe take the stand and make a deposition. Kane, far from bitter about the whole thing, was in fact delighted to oblige, for in his mind he would finally be vindicated as the Father of the iPod, even if he didn’t get stinking rich from it. Not that it’s stopping him from trying, as he’s taking a pot shot at trying to get Apple to throw him some bones. Even if he has no legal standing for having lost the patent, hey, it’s worth a try, right?

In the end, his deposition convinced the courts to chuck Burst.com’s complaints in the round file, ending what has now become a case of limited importance in terms of the suit itself, but possibly the most revealing and interesting suit Apple ever fought for what it revealed. I mean, look at that patent drawing. That’s pretty damn close to the first generation iPod, despite predating it by 22 years, and while Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player (Kane notwithstanding, that honor belonged to the little known MPMan produced by SaeHan Information Systems in 1998), at least we know where that iconic design concept now originated.

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Posted in Apple Corporate, Apple Patents