The idea of going to a specific place online to download or stream music is something we do all the time. But back in the late 1970s, this was still the realm of science fiction.
This brings me to the story of Kane Kramer and James Campbell, a couple of 20-something Brits who conceptualized the idea of a handheld digital device that they pitched to investors. Their patented idea involved connecting the machine to a phone line. It would then reach out to some theoretical data bank of songs and download whatever you wanted to listen to. It was such a cool idea that Paul McCartney was apparently an investor.
Unfortunately, the device pre-dated not just MP3s and other compressed file formats but also the World Wide Web. So while Kramer and Campbell essentially sketched out the idea for iTunes and the iPod, they were about twenty years ahead of their time.
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