Reply to post: Re: SonicStage

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

juice

Re: SonicStage

> Also, yes to data storage on mini disc, I thought for years that would have been a great idea, but of course we have usb sticks these days, i guess everything gets supplanted eventually.

Back in the day, Minidisc could have been a good contender to replace the floppy disc.

The original discs could hold 160mb, which was competitive with Iomega's Zip Drive (launched 2 years later with a capacity of 100mb) and they were far smaller, more robust and reliable - Sony's early marketing campaign featured a band's demo-disc being thrown out of an officeblock window by a grumpy music executive, and then being ran over by a kid on a skateboard, only for the kid to pick the disc up and slap it into his player.

Alas, Sony again hamstrung it: the PC drives couldn't read or write "audio" data, and were hugely expensive.

Given that the tech was cheap and small enough to cram into a walkman, the only logical reason I can think for this is that Sony were deliberately pricing it out of the consumer market to minimise the risk of it being used for piracy.

A quick bit of digging threw up a slashdot article from 2001 bemoaning the platform limitations and lack of affordable hardware (one comment mentions that MD-Data drives cost $750, whereas the zip drive launched at $200), though it also notes that there was some hacked firmware which let you access audio data...

https://ask.slashdot.org/story/01/05/18/186256/minidisc-drives-for-the-pc

As ever, it's interesting to think "what-if" - if the minidisc had managed to get a decent foothold in the PC market, it might well have slowed the adoption of USB thumb drives - after all, these only appeared around 2000, and initially only offered 8-16mb of storage, and minidiscs were cheap, robust and small enough to be easily pocketable.

Quite what impact that would have had on the computer industry in general is anyone's guess, though!

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