Ancient Web: MoP3 Tried to Build a Portable MP3 Player on GeoCities

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before portable MP3 players became everyday appliances, two hobbyists put their plan for building one on a GeoCities homepage.

Visit MoP3's original archived address.

The original page is not currently retrievable there. Fortunately, Frank Hickl and Mario Becker's MoP3 project left a detailed contemporary trace in the June 2001 issue of Elektor Electronics. An illustrated, two-page feature titled More MP3 Projects: DIY portables identifies its home at SiliconValley/Circuit/3150/index.html.

The magazine describes MoP3 as still under development. That qualification matters: the printed report confirms a design and prototype ambitions, not a finished consumer product.

A display, a microcontroller, and a pile of compromises

MoP3 was built around a comparatively inexpensive Motorola MC68HC11 embedded controller. For decoding compressed audio, its creators considered MAS3507D or STA013 integrated circuits. A substantial 128-by-64-pixel LCD was intended to make the player's controls readable. The period photographs and text describe a small circuit board, initially using a CD-ROM drive, with a future hard-disk version planned.

That combination was more ambitious than simply putting a desktop motherboard into a box. In the same Elektor feature, the editors compared other web-hosted designs using SmartMedia cards, conventional disk drives and different processors. The magazine emphasized that these projects made hardware and software information available to fellow experimenters.

MoP3's Internet address was still being recommended in a May 25, 2004 French electronics-forum discussion. A visitor asked for a way to connect a hard disk to a car-radio MP3 setup, and another participant supplied a list of DIY-player sites that included MoP3. This does not prove that the original download links remained operational then; it demonstrates how the homepage circulated as a technical reference.

The surviving documentation is fragmentary. We cannot safely claim the design was completed, sold or widely adopted, and the old build instructions have not been tested.

What the records preserve is a moment when portable digital music was still an engineering challenge people solved publicly, one microcontroller and one amateur website at a time.

Read the 2001 hardware comparison and its numbered MoP3 reference.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.