Sony’s MiniDisc hit the scene in 1992 as Sony’s answer to the CD and cassette, promising the best of both worlds: digital sound in a pocket-sized, rewritable format. Each disc held about 74 minutes of music (later bumped to 80), and with the 2000 release of NetMD, you could finally transfer MP3s from your computer—though at frustratingly slow, real-time speeds. By 2004, Hi-MD pushed storage to 1GB and let you use discs like portable hard drives, but by then, iPods and flash storage had already stolen the spotlight. MiniDiscs were sleek, durable, and way ahead of their time, but they never fully caught on in the US—still, anyone who owned one remembers that little click sliding a disc into a portable player.