They were invented by Sony in the early ’90s, five years before the world’s first MP3 player, but never took off; in part because of Sony’s obsession with proprietary formats and oppressive digital rights management.
Tape recorders were still standard issue for recording interviews back when I did my cadetship at The Age in the late ’90s but, as a tech-head, I was one of the first journalists at the paper to make the leap to a portable MiniDisc recorder.
On the train ride home I’d…
