I was poking around the website from Cabel Sasser (due to my recent love of the Playdate console) and came across this history of their MP3 software Audion that I found fascinating.

It’s cool to read about the software industry around the 00s and how things worked back then. It also included some fascinating twists and turns like the fact that Apple almost bought Panic and wanted them to build iTunes! Just reading about Apple pre-iPod is a trip.

This exchange beween Sasser and Jobs on the showfloor of Macworld was an highlight:

"Well, Steve, I really think it'll still find an audience," I replied. "We've got a lot of higher-end features that you guys probably won't ever add."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"Well, umm.." I was a bit stumped. "You can keep a count of how many times you've played a song, or you can even rate your songs by popularity..."

"...why the hell would anybody want to do that?"

"Well, maybe you want to sort your playlist by your favorite songs..."

"...you've got to understand, this is just 1.0, of course. You can only imagine where we'll be by the time we release 2.0!"

Jobs first dismisses the idea of star ratings just to put Cabel on the spot to pitch the feature to him and explain it. iTunes did end up having this shortly after so he saw the value.

It’s a great read and Sasser is a great storyteller.