This 13-year-old voice recorder captured my entire professional career

theverge.com:

Back in November 2009, I was getting ready to attend the Montreal International Games Summit, and I panicked — it was my first major event as a member of the press, and I had no way to record an interview. This was a problem because I was scheduled to talk with Yoichi Wada, then president of Square Enix, along with several other notable industry people. So I rushed to Radio Shack and picked the cheapest voice recorder I could find, a little grey rectangle made by RCA that was locked up in a glass display case. I have no idea what model it is, but it went on to follow me through my entire professional career to date — now, nearly 13 years later, it’s finally being retired.

I hung on to that gadget for one main reason: I trusted it. The RCA recorder didn’t have any especially notable features; the sound quality was just OK, and it was actually pretty annoying having to keep a bunch of AAA batteries on deck. But I’ve always been paranoid about losing an interview and wasting both my time and — even worse — that of someone who agreed to talk to me for a story. So, as long as the recorder worked, I had no real reason to replace it. And it always worked. Even when the “erase” button fell off, I stuck by it. But earlier this month, while attending Summer Game Fest, I came to a sad conclusion: the rewind button didn’t function, which pushed the recorder past the point of usefulness.

But it lived a good life. In fact, it’s been with me for the entirety of my career at The Verge thus far, which dates back to 2012. Every in-person interview I’ve done in that span was recorded on that machine. I took it with me when I flew to New York to hear Shigeru Miyamoto’s grand plan for bringing Super Mario to the iPhone and when I was in