The iPod server was a powerful first iteration music sharing device. While not designed for convenience, its internal RAID can still be expanded with modern compact flash cards for 1.25TB of on-the-go storage.
Image transcription: A photo of an early iPod with colour display running macosx server 1.2. It looks cumbersomely thick, but also desirable.
(Originally published earlier today on bitbang.social)
I once had a Mac guy turn up at my workplace and tell me 'the document you need is on this iPod'.
I plugged it into a Linux machine and it mounted the filesystem just fine.
The horrors I saw in that filesystem, how it was laid out and how the iPod needed to use its database to present real names to the user ....
I never want to see that again.
how the iPod needed to use its database to present real names to the user
I mean in Apple’s defense you wouldn’t want a media player to show filenames to the user anyways, you would want to display the artist/track name from the mp3 tags. The 4 letter filenames are a hash table presumably due to length restrictions in the firmware and/or performance reasons