Sony’s Memory Stick and ATRAC were peak “only-Sony-would-do-this” moves from the late ‘90s and early 2000s. The original Memory Stick dropped in 1998 as a tiny, purple flash card for things like the Sony Cyber-shot, Handycam, and later the PlayStation Portable, eventually evolving into Memory Stick PRO, Duo, and PRO Duo to chase bigger capacities. Around the same time, Sony pushed ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding), its proprietary music format powering MiniDiscs and early Network Walkmans, promising better sound than MP3 at smaller file sizes. ATRAC got multiple updates—ATRAC3 in 2000, ATRAC3plus in 2003—but never broke outside the Sony bubble, and by the late 2000s, MP3 and SD cards crushed both. For anyone who lived it, the combo screams that era of Sony—sleek, original, and just a little stubborn.