Podcasts, previously known as "audioblogs", had its roots dating back to the 1980s. With the advent of broadband Internet access and portable digital audio playback devices such as the iPod, podcasting began to catch hold in late 2004. Today there are more than 115,000 English-language podcasts available on the Internet, and dozens of websites available for distribution at little or no cost to the producer or listener. Precursors The Illusion of Independent Radio is a Russian samizdat "radio program" created in 1989 in Rostov-on-Don and distributed on magnetic tape and cassettes. It was the first Soviet Russian prototype of the media phenomenon that was widely developed in the 2000s as podcasting. Before the advent of the internet, in the 1980s, RCS (Radio Computing Services), provided music and talk-related software to radio stations in a digital format. Before online music digital distribution, the MIDI format as well as the Mbone, Multicast Network was used to distribute audio and video files. The MBone was a multicast network over the Internet used primarily by educational and research institutes, but there were audio talk programs. Many other jukeboxes and websites in the mid-1990s provided a system for sorting and selecting music or audio files, talk, segue announcements of different digital formats. There were a few websites that provided audio subscription services. In 1993, the early days of Internet radio, Carl Malamud launched Internet Talk Radio which was the "first computer-radio talk show, each week interviewing a computer expert". It was distributed "as audio files that computer users fetch one by one". A 1993 episode of The Computer Chronicles described the concept as "asynchronous radio". Malamud said listeners could pause and restart the audio files at will, as well as skip content they did not like. Some websites allowed downloadable audio shows, such as the comedy show The Dan & Scott Show, available on AOL.com from 1996. Additionally, in 1998, Radio Usach, radio station from the University of Santiago, Chile, explored the option to broadcast online and on demand streaming talk shows. However, the development of downloaded music did not reach a critical mass until the launch of Napster, another system of aggregating music, but without the subscription services provided by podcasting or video blogging aggregation client or system software. Independent of the development of podcasting via RSS, a portable player and music download system had been developed at Compaq Research as early as 1999