Comment by rbanffy
4 days ago
I always found the MD format super cool. It’s a real shame that, even with BD-like densities, it just can’t compete with a cheap USB stick.
4 days ago
I always found the MD format super cool. It’s a real shame that, even with BD-like densities, it just can’t compete with a cheap USB stick.
MiniDisc would have been an ideal successor to the floppy disk if only Sony had unclenched their fist just a little bit. USB sticks are higher capacity but there's utility in having media you don't have to keep track of; especially in the early 2000s it would have been very handy to give somebody a MiniDisc of data and just say "don't worry too much about getting that back to me, I have a whole box at home".
We had rewriteable CDs but they were so awkward, large, and unreliable that it never quite filled that need.
Yeah - like many things Sony they went to proprietary and locked down
True. They screwed themselves thoroughly multiple times.
It could have beaten the Zip Disk and helped MD be adopted as a music format ("oh I have a few of these already, might as well get [a Walkman / PC drive]")
MD was so cool, but the portable players were so fragile, insert the MD the wrong way and you risk ripping the read head out, at least with the Aiwa one i had (and killed that way..)
That is mostly because the players needed to be compact. If you were designing a floppy replacement, it could be built like a tank (and with space to spare).