Betamax anyone?

Here's the loser in a standards war that most Americans have never heard of: MO drive vs. CD-ROM. MO stands for magneto-optical - the media look like minidiscs, are fully rewriteable and hold around 600 megs, I believe.

The format launched about the same time as CD-ROM, and because it's rewriteable, you'd expect it to have done better. Now it's totally redundant: the removable/rewriteable media of choice in Japan is floppy discs or USB drives.

But legacy products do have a long shelf life - every public computer I've seen at Waseda has had a lonely little MO drive sitting next to it.