Digital portables archaeology

^ Regarding CD-3, I hate an idea of a single, be it CD or cassette - a waste of plastic. But if I accepted a single, then CD-3 would be cool, actually. Small and shiny. Watch sci-fi movies of the period, they have small silver discs, smaller than a CD, even smaller than CD-3, because they look cooler. I have a couple of CD-3 singles and was thinking of getting a CD3/MP3 player, but haven't. Once I could get one for a pretty good price, but could not force myself - they all are so ugly and plasticky, compared to MiniDisc.

If not for HDD and then memory cards and streaming, it would be nice if MiniCD was replaced with MiniDVD, 1.4 GB instead of 185 MB, so two CD albums on a single 3-inch DVD. And the portable players could have been shrunk as well.

I actually like that the packaging for CD-3 was all over the place, it made things more interesting.

 

Besides the haircut, the device and especially it's display are curiously styled.
Never saw anyone wearing it at all back in the day.

 

That would be clever on a 128 x 128 pixel screen. There was a thing called WAP - Wireless Application Protocol. A colleague had a phone with that around 2002. Trying to look up a bus time while at the pub he quickly decided it was really "Without Application Protocol".

p.s.

• I have the Muvo somewhere which I bought new an boxed from a bargain bin in Dixons when it was the year before lasts model. The whole thing runs from a single AAA battery in the black part.
• Yes the RCA Lyra used a Compact Flash card.

 

That was common on the early laptops. That was when modem speeds were jumping up every year. On desktop computers I progressed from 14400 Baud to 33K to 56K before switching to ADSL, which had the big advantage of being able to use the phone at the same time.

Most websites were aimed at VGA displays as is apart when you look at old BBC content like this topical news article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/750631.stm