A Teaser from Chapter 3

[Bob Schroeck]

When Ikuko left the dining room after sitting us down there, I 
turned to Usagi and placed one of my spare iPods in front of her, 
along with a set of vintage 2025 Skullcandy earbuds.  "Here you 
go."

She picked it up and turned it over in her hands.  "Huh?  What's
this?"

"That, teishi, is an iPod Zoom.  It's like a Walkman, only 
smaller and with a lot more music on it."

Usagi frowned at the device, which at about a third the size of a 
pack of cigarettes was probably smaller than any music player 
she'd ever seen before.  "How much more?"

I chuckled.  "Remember I said I had something like thirty 
thousand songs in my collection?"  She nodded and I went on.  
"There's about fifteen thousand songs on there."

I'm going to miss Usagi-chan's wild takes when she gets older and
jaded, but for the moment I enjoyed the wide eyes and the sudden
fumbling grasp.  "How far in the future is it from?" she finally
managed to get out.

"The first version of this device will come out in less than ten 
years; this one is from maybe a decade after that.  Here," I 
said, rescuing the iPod before she dropped it, "let me show you 
how to work it."  

[hazard]

Somehow I don't think Usagi is ever quite going to lose the wild takes even when she grows old and jaded.

[Dartz]

And then it breaks....

Usagi takes it to get it fixed.

....Apple gets a new research tool.

On Auigust 4th 1997 the Zoom is released. Human decisions are removed from the selection of music. Zoom begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2.14 am eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, Apple tries to pull the plug.

The Zoom retaliated.

[Norgarth]

And then it breaks....

Usagi takes it to get it fixed.

....Apple gets a new research tool.

On Auigust 4th 1997 the Zoom is released. Human decisions are removed from the selection of music. Zoom begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2.14 am eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, Apple tries to pull the plug.

The Zoom retaliated.

And it's weapon was Justin Beiber.   

[Labster]

What, what, no! If Apple gets it during 1996, Gil Amelio still aquihires Steve Jobs back into the CEO position that year, and I'm pretty sure that Steve could use his Reality Distortion Field™ to convince the AI that it would be insanely great not to upgrade all humans into Cybermen.

Actually what really happens is that if we got a computing device from 2012 back to 1992, like, that's cool and all, but it doesn't tell you that much about the fabbing process that makes a chip. Sure, you get a proven design, and all sorts of tricks that you could use to design other chips... but unless you can make 20nm process chips, what ya gonna do? It's not like you can just scale the design up, that will just make the magic smoke come out very fast from thermal runaway. There are probably some material science things to learn (not really an expert), but it's not like we had a huge breakthrough in semiconductors in the last 30 years. Which is kind of the problem right now.

But either way Apple would invest more in ARM architecture, probably meaning that Intel Macs never get made. But hey, RISC is pretty cool and more energy efficient.

[ECSNorway]

Chip size of the CPU isn't really a big deal here, the big breakthroughs with the ipod were the concept itself, the cheap flash memory chips, and battery life.

And, well, the ability to easily get your music onto a PC in some well-compressed digital format to synch to it.

The compact disk should be already popular by this point, so that gets us over one hurdle.

Figuring out how to read data coming off the chip won't be too hard, then they'll be able to access its file system and figure out how mp3 compression works.

Battery life... people are used to constantly swapping out batteries in walkman-type devices, having one or two AAA's to power a slightly-larger-than-OTL ipod won't phaze anyone. The rechargable battery isn't all that hard either.

The biggest issue is going to be the flash chip, the technology is just hitting the market in 1984, so should be available...

Honestly, there's no reason at all why they couldn't have gone to market with something like this years before they historically did (2001). The biggest issue would be getting music from CD to device, which requires a PC with a CD drive, enough disk space, and the software required. Which, ok, maybe not so easy or cheap. But it's easily something you could arrange to do in kiosk mode, say, in a record store....

[InsaneTD]

I wanna say someone did try a "mp3" player that you loaded the music on at a computer in a record store. But I think it came onto the market about the same time mp3 and ipods did.

[ECSNorway]

Yeah. But all the basic technology was in place by 1984, if not in the same hands. This story is set in 1994, IIRC. So PCs that can handle the CD-to-iPod link are going to be mid-to-high-end, but not bleeding-edge.

[Bob Schroeck]

1992, but yeah.