In 1977, Nikon's optical engineers hand-polished a single aspherical element for the Noct-Nikkor 58mm f/1.2, grinding it by feel because no machine of the era could do the job. It worked, but the process was too slow and too fragile to ever build at scale. That near-miss stuck with the design team. According to Nikon's own account of the lens's history, the challenge became a kind of dare: take the coma-taming trick that made the Noct-Nikkor special, and figure out how to grind it into glass a machine could reproduce.
That dare took roughly a decade to answer. The result, announced in 1993, was the AF Nikkor 28mm f/1.4D, the first 28mm autofocus lens built to f/1.4, and by most accounts the only one of its kind for years afterward. Nikon photography historian Simon Stafford described it in The Nikon Compendium as a lens that arrived at a moment when the company had mostly been putting out modest wide-angle zooms, calling it, in his words, a "sensational lens." It carried a single precision-ground aspherical element, an internal focus system built from one fixed and two moving groups, and a body made mostly of brass and steel at a time when plastic barrels were becoming normal.
Nikon never built very many of them. Estimates from collectors and reviewers who've tried to track production land around 7,000 to 7,300 units total, spread across the roughly twelve years the lens stayed in the catalog. That is a strange number for something Nikon apparently believed in enough to spend a decade developing.
Then, in 2005, Nikon discontinued it. Forum accounts from photographers close to Nikon's professional line at the time describe the decision as deliberate: the lens was reportedly dropped, along with a couple of other wide-angle primes, because its optical formula wasn't judged suitable for where digital sensors were heading. Roughly two years later Nikon released the D3, its first full-frame pro digital body, without a fast wide prime to go with it. For half a decade afterward, anyone wanting an ultra-fast wide angle on a Nikon digital body was stuck waiting; the next comparable lens, the AF-S 24mm f/1.4G, didn't arrive until 2010.
Here's the part that makes the story worth telling rather than just noting. The trait Nikon built this lens around, the ground aspherical element that suppresses coma so a point of light stays a point instead of smearing into a little wing at the edge of the frame, is precisely what night and astro photographers go looking for on modern digital sensors. Enough of them noticed the resemblance to the Noct-Nikkor's whole reason for existing that the lens picked up an informal nickname among admirers: the wide-angle Noct-Nikkor. The lens Nikon judged unfit for the digital age it hadn't quite mapped out yet turned out to be the digital age's favorite way to photograph the sky.
Nikon spent ten years chasing a fix for coma born out of a machine that couldn't grind fast enough. They discontinued the result because they weren't sure sensors were ready for it. The sensors caught up. The lens was waiting.