Sony D-88 Compact Discman
Sony has long excelled at miniaturizing consumer electronics, and some of the last models of Walkman were barely larger than the cassette tapes they contained. With the Sony Discman D-88, the company tried to miniaturize compact disc players as well, but how easy it to travel with a portable CD player featuring a spinning plastic buzzsaw hanging out the side?
The YouTube channel Techmoan went hands-on with the D-88 a few years ago, and while it seemingly had good intentions, the execution was arguably flawed. The Discman D-88 was primarily designed to play 80mm mini CDs, which you possibly received at one point as a promotional item at a trade show, or as a fancy business card. There were truncated albums and singles released on the mini CD format, which can only hold about 24 minutes of music, but most people had an expansive library of albums on 120mm discs. The D-88 could play those too, but since it was designed with mini CDs in mind, it was physically smaller than the larger discs, and for the sake of backwards compatibility, Sony decided that spinning exposed discs was an OK compromise.
