I don't know about you, but in my area we started to see more MDs around the Sharp 722 days [0]. Later on Sony started to make them more afordable and featureful. That's quite a few years of void there.
Oh the nostalgia... I bought an 701 when it came out. I spent soo much time adding proper metadata to the music on my MDs, I feel like I could still use the device blindly because it is ingrained that deep into muscle memory although I haven't used it anymore since 22 years.
[0] apparently 1998 http://www.minidisc.org/part_Sharp_MD-MS721+MS722.html