I’m back with more ancient alien technology.  This one is a bit interesting in our world of endless streaming—an old MP3 player (I’m selling it on eBay, by the way):

This device is a SanDisk Sansa c250, which boasted a whopping two gigabytes of flash storage.  To put that into perspective, my very first MP3 player—which I received for my eighteenth birthday in 2003—had a mere 64 megabytes of storage.  In high school, a friend of mine had an MP3 player that sported an actual hard drive, and he kept it in his truck to play tunes; it was too big to carry around regularly!

This Sansa c250 likely came out when the iPod was getting going, and was a non-Apple competitor.  The music industry in the early 2000s was still trying to figure out how to monetize the digitization of music, and I know for a fact a number of the tunes on this device were rips from CDs or recordings I’d made using crude digital methods.  I know for a fact I owned the CD the song in the picture comes from, and I believe I still do.

But it was a golden and/or dark age of intellectual theft and copyright infringement, depending on one’s perspective, and these devices were quite popular for listening to music on-the-go without the need for a bulky Disc Man.

This unit will power on if the power cable is plugged into a power block with a USB connection.  It will also connect to a computer—I was able to back up all of my old files from it before clearing the data to sell it—but it won’t play while connected to a computer.  At this point, it would mainly be useful as part of a stereo system, as a low-profile way to spin tunes.

It is a cool little piece of technology, and I love the way it looks:

I also made a little video demonstrating its capabilities:

And, if you’re curious, here’s the song playing on the device:

More ancient “alien” technology to come!

—TPP