What I never got was why MD were never pushed as main rw disc drives on PC. IIRC Rewritable MDs were mainstream long before CD-R and it would have filled an immense need to replace floppy disks at the time (I love vintage and nostalgia, but floppies had way too much io errors, and the speed was.. not really there).
Maybe there were real technical reasons why data MD drives never caught up (too much cpu power required to handle the data ?) ..
What I had always wanted was a drive that played both music Minidiscs and MD data discs so I could also use the discs for both. At least I don't think there were any dual-use decks or recorders, and I couldn't justify getting a data drive when I already had a recorder. Back in the 90s I always assumed that was because Sony was paranoid about piracy; I even had to buy some kind of device so I could record digital audio from my computer directly onto audio MDs. (If I recall correctly, it's been a while!)
Minidiscs had a data capacity of around 150MB, IIRC. By that point Zip drives were already very common so you'd need a compelling reason for MD and I just don't think one was there.
There was an MD Data variant, and you could buy PC drives for it. It didn't last very long.
The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason why Iomega Zip and all the other superfloppy formats failed: none of them beat the CD on storage density and media cost. By the time the market actually needed a successor to 1.44MB floppies, everyone also had internal hard drives, so a lot of the use of the floppy drive was to install software. The fact that CDs couldn't be written to (yet) didn't matter. The fact that they held 650MB made them mandatory equipment, while every other rewritable medium was just a luxury for professional users working with a lot of data. And CD-Rs and RWs killed that last niche, too, even though they were less convenient[0] than superfloppies were.
[0] Writable optical media is a bit of a hack, necessitating processes like "mastering" and "finalization" to try and make the writable disc look like a regular disc to drives and players that aren't aware of the rewriting process.
You could get them, although I've never seen one. I know someone who had a MD data drive on his PC which he used for copying large audio files onto (he had a multitrack recorder that also used them) with the handy advantage that they had considerably more capacity than Zip disks.
Apparently they were reliable but godawful slow, and he was glad to move onto SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards.
Sony's history of media formats and devices is fascinating. I keep thinking that at some stage they're going to stop creating new ones, but somehow never seems to happen.
This goes into just 6 of the media formats, but there are so many more.
I actually love to get something like this as a dedicated Wikipedia device. Text only Wikipedia is 25.90 GB atm [0] so a dirt cheap 32GB microSD would be more than enough. Maybe an old ebook reader
I loved MiniDisc as a format and was an avoid user in the late 1999s before I transitioned to an iPod 3G in 2003 or something like that.
Anyway… that was a preamble… in 2001 I spotted some of these in a weird shop in London near Russel Square. They had a sticker price of £150 which I thought was absurd. In one of my very few attempts to haggle in my life, I offered £50 and the shop attendant turned me down flatly. I was mildly disappointed because they were so brazenly “alternate timeline cassette futurism” (before the latter term existed) and the thought that I’d missed a golden opportunity gnawed at me for years. At some point in 2002 or 2003 I went back, but the stock had gone. I doubt they sold any of them at that price in that age.
Anyway, I probably dodged a bullet. They looked cool though.
Those applications seem pretty weak. In a similar timeframe I seem to recall possessing a standalone dictionary/crossword solver device, and a five-language translator/dictionary. Both of which were much more compact and presumably had small, solid-state data in ROM chips. The monochrome, text-first Data Discman software looks similar to the output of those basic devices.
I suspect the problem with the Data Discman was weak multimedia capabilities, compared to the what can fit on a CD-ROM, in either its API or what the hardware could push. If the software of the Data Discman had been more like Microsoft Encarta, it might have wowed people.
I have not one but two Data Discmans, unfortunately neither works. I believe both need to be re-capped and disassembling them (correctly) is a bigger task than I'm interested in at the moment. I'm going to have to see if I can get the emulator running and try out the discs I have.
The Data Discman fascinated me ever since I first saw mention of it in a magazine. This was the early 90s so CDs were still Brobdingnagian compared to other storage media at the time. A portable device that could carry an encyclopedia? Amazing! To me at the time they were a Star Trek technology made real.
As an aside I still love Sony's consumer electronics industrial design from the 90s. It was a great intersection of functional and attractive.
me too! somehow in my retro computing/gadget collecting I ended up with two Data Discmans, a DD-8 and a DD-10BZ, they both work fine and the DD-10 is complete in original box as well.
What I never got was why MD were never pushed as main rw disc drives on PC. IIRC Rewritable MDs were mainstream long before CD-R and it would have filled an immense need to replace floppy disks at the time (I love vintage and nostalgia, but floppies had way too much io errors, and the speed was.. not really there).
Maybe there were real technical reasons why data MD drives never caught up (too much cpu power required to handle the data ?) ..
What I had always wanted was a drive that played both music Minidiscs and MD data discs so I could also use the discs for both. At least I don't think there were any dual-use decks or recorders, and I couldn't justify getting a data drive when I already had a recorder. Back in the 90s I always assumed that was because Sony was paranoid about piracy; I even had to buy some kind of device so I could record digital audio from my computer directly onto audio MDs. (If I recall correctly, it's been a while!)
Minidiscs had a data capacity of around 150MB, IIRC. By that point Zip drives were already very common so you'd need a compelling reason for MD and I just don't think one was there.
I was young at the time, but weren't zip drives and media much more expensive ?
I just wish pro-sumer LTO tape drives became a thing.
There was an MD Data variant, and you could buy PC drives for it. It didn't last very long.
The technical reason why MD Data never caught on is the same reason why Iomega Zip and all the other superfloppy formats failed: none of them beat the CD on storage density and media cost. By the time the market actually needed a successor to 1.44MB floppies, everyone also had internal hard drives, so a lot of the use of the floppy drive was to install software. The fact that CDs couldn't be written to (yet) didn't matter. The fact that they held 650MB made them mandatory equipment, while every other rewritable medium was just a luxury for professional users working with a lot of data. And CD-Rs and RWs killed that last niche, too, even though they were less convenient[0] than superfloppies were.
[0] Writable optical media is a bit of a hack, necessitating processes like "mastering" and "finalization" to try and make the writable disc look like a regular disc to drives and players that aren't aware of the rewriting process.
You could get them, although I've never seen one. I know someone who had a MD data drive on his PC which he used for copying large audio files onto (he had a multitrack recorder that also used them) with the handy advantage that they had considerably more capacity than Zip disks.
Apparently they were reliable but godawful slow, and he was glad to move onto SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards.
Sony's history of media formats and devices is fascinating. I keep thinking that at some stage they're going to stop creating new ones, but somehow never seems to happen.
This goes into just 6 of the media formats, but there are so many more.
https://www.slashgear.com/1675900/discontinued-sony-formats-...
A more recent example: Archival Disc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Disc
The author should really upload these to the Internet Archive.
The emulator (which seems like it's for DOS) seems a strange thing to include on the disc:
TFA states they will do so once they receive the expected takedown notice from Sony.
I actually love to get something like this as a dedicated Wikipedia device. Text only Wikipedia is 25.90 GB atm [0] so a dirt cheap 32GB microSD would be more than enough. Maybe an old ebook reader
0, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...
You used to be able to have the entirety of Wikipedia on an iPod. Back when the entire text was 4gb.
But I mean considering Wikipedia pages are so small, and Internet so cheap. Why?
I loved MiniDisc as a format and was an avoid user in the late 1999s before I transitioned to an iPod 3G in 2003 or something like that.
Anyway… that was a preamble… in 2001 I spotted some of these in a weird shop in London near Russel Square. They had a sticker price of £150 which I thought was absurd. In one of my very few attempts to haggle in my life, I offered £50 and the shop attendant turned me down flatly. I was mildly disappointed because they were so brazenly “alternate timeline cassette futurism” (before the latter term existed) and the thought that I’d missed a golden opportunity gnawed at me for years. At some point in 2002 or 2003 I went back, but the stock had gone. I doubt they sold any of them at that price in that age.
Anyway, I probably dodged a bullet. They looked cool though.
Those applications seem pretty weak. In a similar timeframe I seem to recall possessing a standalone dictionary/crossword solver device, and a five-language translator/dictionary. Both of which were much more compact and presumably had small, solid-state data in ROM chips. The monochrome, text-first Data Discman software looks similar to the output of those basic devices.
I suspect the problem with the Data Discman was weak multimedia capabilities, compared to the what can fit on a CD-ROM, in either its API or what the hardware could push. If the software of the Data Discman had been more like Microsoft Encarta, it might have wowed people.
I have not one but two Data Discmans, unfortunately neither works. I believe both need to be re-capped and disassembling them (correctly) is a bigger task than I'm interested in at the moment. I'm going to have to see if I can get the emulator running and try out the discs I have.
The Data Discman fascinated me ever since I first saw mention of it in a magazine. This was the early 90s so CDs were still Brobdingnagian compared to other storage media at the time. A portable device that could carry an encyclopedia? Amazing! To me at the time they were a Star Trek technology made real.
As an aside I still love Sony's consumer electronics industrial design from the 90s. It was a great intersection of functional and attractive.
me too! somehow in my retro computing/gadget collecting I ended up with two Data Discmans, a DD-8 and a DD-10BZ, they both work fine and the DD-10 is complete in original box as well.
There is authoring software available at http://www.robotsandcomputers.com/computers/dd8h.htm to create compatible CDRs full of books assuming you can find some blank Mini CD-Rs or CD-RWs.
neat devices, Sony was always ahead of the time
If memory serves, they have a notable mention in the Niven-Pournelle novel _Fallen Angels_.