As a car enthusiast, I can think of a good one, the Ford Nucleon.
During the 1950s and 1960s, there was considerable interest in nuclear power and its potential applications. This led to the idea of using nuclear energy to propel cars. The concept behind a nuclear car was to utilize a small nuclear reactor to generate steam, which would then power the vehicle's engine.
Of course back in those days, this was extremely futurustic and some at the time thought this would be a game changer, but ultimately, the safety aspect was one of the biggest reasons why this idea was dropped, and I probably don't have to explain why it may not have considered to be safe, I mean, it was using nuclear power, so even if the engineers tried to make it as safe as possible, IF something went wrong, it would have been catastrophic.
Ever since then, the interests in the automotive sector has shifted to Electric and Hydrogen.
Still, a very intriguing concept car and idea.
Outside cars, you have blimps, and I personally believe if we tried to make something like a hindenburg today with existing technology, we might have been a lot more successful than back then (as it goes way back to 1930s), there are still some blimps used occasionally, I also don't believe those use hydrogen(?), but they are not the "game changer in air travel" it was once seen as, although we can't rule out a comeback.
What about you guys?
MD players were never hugely popular, but I used the crap out of mine. When I was a in the Navy I had a MD player and it could hold something like, 100 ish songs per MD? It was clutch for going underway. This was like a revolutionary amount of size for its compactness, but more importantly, the durability of the disks. No worries about scratching, you could just throw them in with the rest of your crap. I used mine endlessly and it was also a cool color scheme (like white with orange accents. sony I think).
They were pretty popular in Japan
Interesting, oh well, sony made them didn't they, I am guessing it was certainly more popular there because of that?
I remember seeing them for sale at Best Buy when I was in highschool and my friends and I all wanted to try it out, but no one could afford the player, and no one's parents would buy it for them since we all already had CD players and a bunch of CDs lol
Yeah it was a splurge buy for me since I had very little space and needed to pack as much content/ media as I could into as small a space as possible.
Wow that sounds really good, sad how even CDs no longer enjoy the popularity they once had, everything has become more digital and for physical stuff you have USBs now.
Laptops, cars, and etc have also slowly stopped allowing CD inputs. They don't even have that option any more these days.
Although, there is one area where CDs are used a lot till date, consoles, Xbox and PlayStation especially, I am surprised even the new generations have that.
I think this: https://www.minidisc.org/part_Sony_MZ-S1.html is the one I had?
I had it for ages. Literally a tank and it was like 20 bucks for minidisks so you could stack them up with Mp3's.
It had a very pleasurable thunk when you loaded a disk iirc.