[dcminter]

With the exception of cellphones, almost everything that needed a battery in the 90s used disposable dry cell batteries. Left unattended they often leaked destroying the device. Now almost everything that needs a battery has a rechargeable one built in.

There are a few downsides to that but it's a hell of a lot more convenient! As a kid in the 70s/80s any battery powered toy spent most of it's life unpowered and useless (except coin-cell powered LCD devices which always seemed to be immortal)

[rahimnathwani]

In the 80s, soon after I was gifted a Sanyo portable cassette player, I bought a battery charger (10 GBP) and set of 4 nickel cadmium AA batteries.

[Eduard]

And plenty of Lithium rechargeables are a statistical storage box fire liability