Well, when I first started really getting into this, there weren't any of the popular brands of adult-sized diapers that you see in the stores today. Back then (we're talking around 1980 or so) in order to get adult-sized disposable diapers you had to go to a medical supply store.
For several years, I'd been making my own diapers--doing the "towels and trash bags" thing. Then I stared buying toddler-sized Pampers (in the purple boxes) and taping two of them together lengthwise, overlapping them in the middle, and using those.
By this time, I was with my first girlfriend (mentioned in lots of other posts, the one who initially accepted my diapers, then changed her mind and started hating them once she finally let me into her pants...it was "now that I'm giving you this, you no longer need THOSE). Well this was during the time when she still let me wear them and one day we decided to go out shopping and see if we could find any adult-sized diapers for me.
We weren't really looking for disposable ones and would have been overjoyed to have found adult-sized cloth diapers and plastic pants somewhere. It was just a day when I was wearing my diapers and we wanted to go out and do something diaper-related, so we decided to spend the day looking.
After not finding anything in any retail stores, we ended up at a medical supply store, where you could buy a case of “Disposable Adult Diapers.” That’s what they were called, and they came in a big cardboard box of 120 which was the only size you could buy. This was the only kind, and the medical store was the only place that sold them.
I remember the sales guy there. He kept asking me for my insurance information. I didn’t want to give it to him because I was still on my parents’ insurance policy and didn’t want them to get a statement back listing that I’d bought a case of adult diapers. The guy kept on, saying “you mean you want to pay for them when your insurance will cover them?”
I finally handed him the money and said “Can you ring these up, I really have to leave!”
They really WERE NOT very good. They were flat, rectangular, and had no scent at all. After trying a few I decided that I didn't like them at all and went back to my "do it yourself cloth" diapers and "trash bag" plastic pants, and used the "Disposable Adult Diapers" as changing pads until I'd used them all up.
Another example of how people who are into this today have it SO much easier than the ones of us who were doing this 40 years ago.