The Malaga MP3 Miracle
Today, it's amusing. 20 years ago, it was impossible.
As I write these words I am currently sitting on a cruise ship just outside Malaga, Spain. Malaga is the birthplace of both Pablo Picasso and Antonio Banderas, a fact our tour guide mentioned seventeen times.
For guys like me who are into retro technology, it’s impossible not to compare the technology I have here in front of me — all around me, really — with what existed, say, twenty years ago.
In fact, I believe it was almost exactly twenty years ago when I took an epic road trip from Oklahoma to Chicago. The 800-mile drive wasn’t particularly notable as my dad’s family is from Chicago and I had made that drive many times throughout the years. What made the trip memorable were two things: GPS, and WiFi.
Today we all know what a GPS does and how to operate one. Back in the early 2000s we didn’t have those car mounted GPS units yet and smartphones were still years away. I believe it was in 2003 that a coworker showed me his GPS unit which was this small yellow device that connected to a computer via a serial port and provided map navigation by streaming maps off of a CD-ROM. That’s a lot to take in, so allow me to paint this picture for you. To use this GPS you had to first set up a laptop in your car. You also needed one of those 12v-to-120v power converters, since without one my laptop would run for less than an hour, especially when using the CD-ROM drive. Then you had to purchase the GPS itself which came with a CD-ROM. The GPS had to be somewhere like on the dash so it could get a clear signal from the sky, and the laptop had to be somewhere where you could see the screen. If this sounds like a wiring nightmare and a safety hazard, you’re imagining it correctly.
But it worked. You could type an address into the program and it would draw you a little map and do all the things that your phone does today.
The other thing I remember from that trip was the discovery of WiFi. I don’t remember exactly when people started getting WiFi routers, but I can tell you this was the time where lots of people began buying them and almost nobody set up a password for them. This meant that on any given street in a neighborhood you had pretty good odds of finding one or two WiFi hotspots without a password that you could connect to. And in an apartment complex, you might find 50.
The drive from Oklahoma City to Chicago is approximately 800 miles and usually takes us right around twelve hours. That trip took seemed to take forever as, roughly once an hour, I would exit the interstate, look for an open WiFi signal to eonnect to, connect my laptop to some random person’s WiFi, check my email, respond to any important messages, and then get back on the interstate.
My favorite thing about that trip was something I said to my wife when I got home, which was “I don’t know how, but someday, doing all of this will be much simpler.”
And of course today it is. My iPhone eliminated all those gadgets and lots more. No more PDAs (I miss my Palm Pilot!), no more digital camera, no more camcorder, no more laptop in the car for navigation, no more briefcase full of CDs for the road… all gone.
Here’s why I was reminded of that story today, as I sit portside along Spain. I brought a pair of wireless earbuds with me and when we got back on the ship today, I put them in my ears. Immediately, music began to play. Sometimes that happens — plug in headphones and the last audio source you were using them them will open and start playing. In this case, it was PlexAmp… which kind of made my jaw drop a bit.
PlexAmp is an app that allows me to stream music from my home server to my phone. That in and of itself is pretty cool, but just now, while sitting on a cruise ship, my phone just connected to a cell phone tower in Spain and started streaming music to me from my server in Oklahoma.
We’ve come a long way in 20 years. (The difference between 2005 and 1985 is even more boggling.) I cannot wait to see what 2045 brings.
For now, it’s time for a nap. And to listen to some relaxing sounds from the 80s, coming to me 40 year and thousands of miles away.
Plex isn't perfect, but I love it. What you describe has been the dream of digital packrats since media got decent enough to be playable and watchable. Until the day when all of my devices can hold all of my media, its gives me exactly what I need. Perfect story for it.
You reminded me of my 1st generation "portable" Satellite Radio I got from Best Buy in 2005. Any time the car was moving, there'd be static. It was incredibly frustrating, and led to a lot of pulling over to the curb just so I could sing along to "Tumbling Dice". It did have a feature where you could record up to 4 hours of music, so I started using it as basically a knockoff IPod.