I felt like it lasted much longer. Of course, this was pre Internet days, so I read it in papers and watched on TV

Agreed- after the Pons & Fleischman debacle 34 years ago, it's pretty pathetic to watch people get excited about such obvious scams. They'll never learn.

CF wasn't something that was possible under our understanding of physics at the time. Room temp ambient pressure superconductors are perfectly possible under our understanding of physics.

Comparing the two is silly.

Super conductors exist. Room temperature net out fusion does not exist, and may never exist, and there are no known pathways in physics that would lead to it. Super conductors do not require any new physics, they require a material that may or may not exist but given the steady progression in the temperature range over which superconductivity has been observed there is a good chance that it exists, we just haven't found it yet.

Note that the 'room temperature' thing is a human requirement, and not one grounded in physics of conductivity per se, and that we started around 3 Kelvin (or -270 degrees Celsius)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superconductors-t...

To 200K or -70 Celsius) degrees for the latest confirmed superconductor:

https://physicsworld.com/a/hydrogen-sulphide-is-warmest-ever...

In about 100 years. That is on average a two degree per year increase over that period. But the rate of improvement isn't linear and the closer you get to zero the bigger the market is and so the larger the amount of funding available to search for the bit that will close the gap.

This is why we will likely have room temperature superconductors somewhere in the near future, assuming it doesn't already exist. Obviously there is no guarantee that anything that hasn't been discovered yet exists. But in this case, given the arbitrariness of the boundaries set and the fact that those are mostly dictated by chance conditions on planet Earth (if we were living on the dark side of the moon we'd already have room temperature superconductivity...).