MDs are just another example of Sony screwing it up by making things proprietary and keeping it to themselves instead of creating an ecosystem (memory sticks were another example, although they didn't offer quite the same advantages). It's really a shame, I think if Sony would have gone about this differently they likely would have put off the emergence of MP3 players for a long time.
It’s a funny comment because those formats only existed to be proprietary. Sony learnt the wrong lessons from CD, which they co developed with Phillips. They saw the success of that format and wished they were getting royalties on the underlying tech.
They then wasted billions and decades in formats other companies wouldn’t touch because they had fees attached. Minidisc being a prime example. Sounded worse than CDs, cost the same. Had a recording feature people already had with cassette.
There were already plenty of “successors to the floppy” in the dustbin of history (floptical, Iomega zip, LS120, …). None of them was competitive as a distribution format, or at all once CD-R became widely available.
Yeah, and the MiniDisc was the only one that could have come close. Sony already had computer MiniDisc readers/writers, mass production with pre-recorded content, (fairly) large volumes.
They just never connected these things to each other. It could have been a great standard and we would have been plagued to this day with them. :)
In some ways it's even better than USB flash. There are no read-only flash drives, for instance. It's also a problem that you mosh "data" in the same port you mosh "keyboard" or "spy device". We gained a lot with the USB paradigm but we lost some things, too.
MiniDisk! I loved that format. Great physical size. I suspect my love is all about nostalgia for the future, because when they came out they were foreign (at least in the US) and fly.
After using minidisk I was sure that LS120 would succeed. The formats of cartridged optical disks mostly removed the annoyance of scratched disks. Now the only place I see optical disks in a cartridge is at the library where they put some CDs in a cartridge to use in a special drive.
I was in college during the time, but I remember all of these digital art students had iMacs and these clear+blue FireWire zip drives they used to carry around between classes and home.
In principle, maybe, but Zip disks were errorprone, didn't store music for portable players, and were rather large and cumbersome. Minidiscs were even smaller than floppies and more robust.
