This is amusing: apparently the roots of the iPod’s development are traced back to 1979, when “Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip.” He didn’t renew the patent in 1988, so he hasn’t seen a dime from it. “To be honest,” he said, “I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged.”