The Discman (portable CD player)

Sony’s D-50, released in 1984, shrank the compact disc player to roughly the size of the disc itself and created the portable CD market it branded the Discman. It gave listeners CD-quality audio on the move, but the spinning disc made it sensitive to motion; early units skipped at the slightest jolt until anti-shock memory buffers became standard in the 1990s. Flash-based MP3 players and the iPod, with no moving parts and far more capacity, made the format pointless, and portable CD players had largely vanished from stores by around 2010.