Today we set the wayback machine for February of 1998…
In late ’97 I had moved to a forty acre farm in the backwoods of Rhoadesville Virginia and was working on some very high-tech stuff in D.C. – which is a pretty good drive…
For a while now MP3s had been a thing, as were burnable CDs, and making CDs full of MP3s to play on the computer was also a thing. But the car was still limited to audio CDs, and while you could make them yourself the storage was limited to 10-11 tracks at best. And I-95 wasn’t in the best repair so even the high-end CD player in my car would skip quite a bit.
Portable MP3 players were being experimented with, but weren’t a reality just yet, so the solution for me was MiniDisc.
For my birthday in 1998 I bought what was the best portable MiniDisc player / recorder on the market at the time, with the intention of using it on my daily drive back and forth to D.C… The Sharp MD-MS702.
What really sold me on the Sharp was that it was essentially a recording studio in your pocket. I could connect it to my home hi-fi setup optically, so ripping a track on a CD to a track on the MD was easy, as well as being able to title the track and see the info on the LCD screen.
The MD player allowed for all-digital mixtapes, essentially – and it didn’t skip no matter how bad I-95 got.
I still use the MD player pretty often; I take it with me on evening walks, play MDs I recorded before the turn of the century, and remember how cool everything was in the before times. 🙂
Listening to "Hollow" by LeBrock