Maybe I'm not remembering correctly but wasn't the iPod the first MP3 player to combine a disk harddrive with flash memory? Thereby allowing it to store gigs of music when the rest were touting 64 - 128 MBs of storage?
No. The early iPods used a hard drive, the later ones used flash for storage. The iPod was not the first device to provide a hard disk for large storage; look up the Personal Jukebox and the Creative NOMAD.
(I know it came post-iPod, but I loved my Creative NOMAD Zen Xtra. 60 GB drive and it would play all day on a charge, no trouble (wish my Android phone could pull that off))
Seems like a pretty big deal to me.