A Badger coinvented the iPod. Michael Dhuey ’80 studied electrical and computer engineering at the UW, which came in handy throughout his 25 years working for Apple between 1980 and 2005. He codeveloped the Macintosh II computer in 1987, and he was one of two hardware engineers who built the iPod, which hit the market in 2001. The device wasn’t the first MP3 player, but the original iPod held many more songs — almost 1,000 more — than any other technology at the time. Thanks in part to Dhuey, the iPod’s impressive digital library could play 30 hours of music and still fit in your pocket. (A regular shirt pocket at that, not a giant pocket like you’d have on cargo pants, which were so popular at the time.) After his stint at Apple, Dhuey joined the team at Cisco, where he still works to improve teleconferencing technology. You won’t find many iPods on campus today. (You will, however, see cargo pants again.) In 2022, Apple produced its last generation of the iPod line following consumers’ shift to iPhones, other smartphones, and music-streaming apps. The editors of the Badger yearbook didn’t realize how right they were when they noted the popularity of iPods on campus in 2005: “Holding up to 15,000 songs at max capacity, the iPod was a dream machine for music lovers everywhere. Just as the cassette tape was forced into retirement by the invention of CDs, this incredible product by Apple proves that the cycle could repeat itself.”