A view from our seven-mile hike.

I’m feeling nostalgic today. Maybe it’s because I cleaned out my son’s desk drawer or maybe it’s because he spent a few days with us this past week. We enjoyed talking about years gone by, memories of his childhood and listening to music together. We even took a seven-mile hike and camped overnight in the nearby mountains.

Back to today, I decided to clean out his desk and I found his high school IDs, ACT and SAT reports and the most important electronic device in his life—an iPod nano, circa 2005. He would have been in middle school at the time. His nano opened his world to music and he was the envy of many of his school friends and swim mates for a few months—until everyone had one. I remember years with his nano with him at all times.

I searched through other drawers to find a charger that had a really, really wide base. I don’t remember the chargers being that wide, do you?

My son’s 1st generation iPod. It was engraved on the back with his name and “I think therefore iPod.”

I found one in my daughter’s desk—next to one of her formerly prized possessions, a Pantech slide phone. How tricky was that? How on earth did she text on it? I never got the hang of it. She loved the phone because it came with a big sliding screen—and a camera.

I charged up the nano and listened to a few of my son’s songs. Then I tried to charge the old phone of my daughter’s. I wanted to take a peek at the photos she took on her first phone with a camera. I texted my son that I had found his iPod nano and I was going to mail it to him. He surprised me with a “please don’t.” I guess I’m the one feeling nostalgic, he’s over it.

I found an article about the history of the iPod. Here’s the section about the 1st generation iPod nano by Jacob Kastrenakes in “The iPod nano had a weird, amazing history.”

Like the iPod Classic three years before it, the iPod nano’s death today was a long time coming. But years ago, before the product stalled out, lost its identity, and was made wholly unnecessary by the iPhone, it featured some of Apple’s finest design and arguably represented the iPod at its peak — tiny, fun, and focused.

1ST GENERATION, 2005
My favorite iPod nano iteration has always been the very first one (seen above). It came in black and white with a silver back, like a shrunken-down version of the classic iPod, and it felt immediately retro. It wasn’t throwing back to anything — just the iPod released a year earlier. But it was as though the nano had leapt so far ahead as to make the traditional iPod feel like a thing of the past, like the nano was a modern riff on technology we used to use and love.

What were your favorite devices 10 to 15 years ago? Did you have an iPod too?

Hiking.