Sony eMarker Radio Song Identifier
The $20 Sony eMarker is arguably the ancestor of music-recognizing apps like Shazam and SoundHound. The gadget helped users figure out the name of a song they randomly heard on the radio, but without a mobile internet connection, a microphone, or an intelligent AI. Instead, you pushed a single button on the keychain-sized device, and then when you connected it to a computer later via USB, its application would leverage your location to list what songs were playing on various local radio stations at that point and time.
It was a clever solution to getting dated 2000s-era technology to recognize songs, but even 21 years ago, limiting the user to just 10 song requests at a time before having to sync the device to a computer was laughably restrictive given all it had to store was basic timestamp data.
