i remember this struggle like it was yesterday
these kids now a days don’t understand
Preach!
And then and then and THEN you gotta understand that these motherfuckers were designed to be played sitting on a level surface, and if you even thought about getting too energetic, you’d get nothing but a scratching sound, a couple seconds of silence, and the sinking feeling in your stomach that somehow you’d fucked up.
I remember the first time they introduced the “anti-skip” function, which just meant that the Discman had a tiny tiny cache and would read ahead 5 seconds, so if it skipped, it had time to recover and play uninterrupted… unless of course you jumped around for more than 5 seconds…
In 1999 I had an mp3 player that held. Wait for it…
…
And yet it was so deeply superior to a discman that I was willing to pay $200 for it.