Remembering the MiniDisc: The best thing that never happened to your musicThe cruelest truth in technology is that being better doesn't always mean being the winner – or even surviving at all. Almost 20 years ago my uncle gave me one of the best pieces of technology I've ever owned, a product that still fetches nearly $200 on eBay despite the fact that the format it's built on has been dead for years. Before the iPod, before smartphone-based media players – heck, before smartphones themselves – there was the MiniDisc player, a new generation of Walkman.
The disc that gave the player its name offered the same amount of song time as a CD, but occupied less than half the space in the hand. It also boasted a durable plastic casing to protect against scratches, and it supported a shock memory technology that made vibration-based "skipping" virtually impossible. Oh, and in a world where rewritable CDs had yet to go mainstream, MiniDiscs were also rewritable.
There's plenty that MiniDisc got wrong, from its high prices to i...
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Remembering the MiniDisc: The best thing that never happened to your music
