I remember the Sony MiniDisk audio recorder/player. You could record digital audio, but couldn't transfer it to your computer in digital format.
Due to the possibility that you might not have had license to record what you recorded, then you couldn't have a digital version of it on your computer.
I loved my MiniDisk player, but the arbitrary roadblocks that Sony put up for how you were allowed to use the device and the poor quality of the management software were so infuriating that I vowed not to give Sony another cent for ten years. (I stuck to that promise too, even avoiding the temptation of the beautiful PRS-505 e-book reader. That turned out to be a good decision when the first Kindle came out shortly after.)
Hmm, my PRS e-reader is still going strong and I remember choosing it over a kindle, specifically because it had fewer restrictions on how I use it. It could read PDFs and ePubs, DRM-free, which I believe kindle couldn't at the time. Not sure how the landscape has changed.
Sony sadly has a long history of limiting devices in crazy ways. Their beautiful ebook reader was a disaster from a software perspective.
Paradoxically, since they are a conglomerate some divisions have sane policies. Their mobile phone one is among the few manufacturers that release kernels and make it easy to self-compile your own AOSP.
Really wishing I would have realized that before buying my Sony Bravia TV a few years ago. It's basically just an output device for my Roku, I don't want/need any of the built-in smart TV junk but a recent update now causes it to reboot just about every time I turn it on.
The reboot process takes almost a full minute, but at least the SONY logo emblazoned on the screen during that time has hopefully given me a Pavlovian aversion to their brand so that I won't make the same mistake again.
I remember buying mine, then them saying they would'nt support apps on it anymore, then a month later the netflix app stopped working, was great timing i ended up getting a pirate box instead. Never again sony, never again.
You might like the Nook. I've been rooting e-ink Nooks for about nine years, and the latest model can install Android apps without root! I mostly use it for studying with Ankidroid.
The PRS-505 supports ePub. Can't remember if that was after a firmware update or from the factory though. And even after the Sony ebook store closed down they let you transfer everything to Kobo. And you can still sideload ePubs on with Adobe Digital Editions.
Early Kindles are going to lose a lot of functionality soon as 3G networks get shut down and they have no WiFi to fall back on.
SONY got the bad reputation but you can thank the western record companies for this with their reaction to Sony's earlier DAT format. Check out "An Open Letter To Japan" in this 1986 issue of "Billboard" (page 9): https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/80...
Indeed. SONY tried user-friendly copying and nearly got banned from the US for their trouble.
A common refrain during the Napster lawsuit was that "the law needs to catch up to technology". This is hilariously wrong, looking back on it. The music industry was very adamant back in the 70s and 80s that consumers shouldn't have access to audio recording technology, especially not digital copies. As a result, the law was about 20 steps ahead of technology. Any and all consumer audio recording technology had to prevent second-generation digital copies via SCMS.
The fact that MP3 players were even allowed to exist (see RIAA v. Diamond) is a minor miracle; birthed from a legal battle that I doubt Sony was at all interested in fighting. At that point they had literally bought a record label, which pushed a lot of internal corporate changes within SONY. It's far harder to justify selling devices to copy music when you also happen to sell music.
(Of course, Apple wound up completely monopolizing music sales for a decade by more or less ignoring all of the above, getting involved in both sides of the business, and just using the superior user experience to steamroll over both labels and other device manufacturers.)
Today's world isn't much better. I've lost music I paid for because I'm not allowed to transfer it from a device of one generation to the next. It's even worse now that I'm pushed into streaming services on all the platforms that I use. If only NFTs meant I could actually retain ownership of my music collection....
No, but they were a monopoly on digital music sales. Specifically because it was the only music DRM iPods would work with, and competing MP3 players that supported other DRM schemes were pure garbage.
By the time iTunes went DRM-free (in 2009), CD sales were about a third of what they were at their peak and digital was the industry's only growth market. 90% of 40% is still a huge chunk of the market.
This isn't quite accurate, SONY was furious about the fate of DAT and how the recording industry sabotaged it, so they bought a major record producer (Columbia), unfortunately it seems at least for a time, the foxes came to rule the hen house at SONY, hence their 20 years of so of self sabotage with format restrictions.
One day I couldn't transfer my legally, newly bought Sony Music CD to my Sony MD player for mobile use (on my also expensive car and mobile MD players) because of DRM.
That's when I decided I don't care anymore. What's the point if after all that money Napster and the newly released iPod provide a better experience.
I have a 5 disc cd /md shelf radio. You could copy cds to mds with a few button presses. I used that a lot at the turn of the century.
I tried the mds a year ago and they work (the cd mechanisms is jammed) now the stereo is mainly used through the aux jack.
I will agree MD would have made an excellent computer disc format had Sony allowed it. (They had something called MD Data but it was terrible). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc
Sony’s media group has been an absolute cancer to the device group. To this day they make some of the best hardware on the market. To this day I won’t buy any of it beyond the PlayStation because of how horribly they screw it up with DRM and associated restrictions.
How does it not help much? I’ve probably got a total of less than $2k invested into PlayStations and games in my entire life. If I were to add up all the electronic devices I’ve purchased in my entire life that could have been Sony but weren’t it would probably be pushing 6 figures.
If you want to screw Sony, there's no better way to do it than to buy a Playstation and use it only as a dumb media player. They make money licensing games, not selling the console itself.
Honestly, I still did and still do love their headphones. For the money, Sony is probably the best bargain out there by far. But I'll never own another Sony product with a mircorprocessor. Not a phone, not a camera, not a receiver/amp, not a laptop computer. And I still won't buy music under the Sony label. Thank you Muse for signing with WB!
It's a good thing that I bought my MiniDisc player in 2004, just a year before the rootkit fiasco. Because I loved that device.
Their phones used to be great. I had many Cybershot and Walkman branded Sony Ericsson feature phones over the years. The Walkman ones had good media features/speakers, and the Cybershots gave you good optics, a real flash, and generous megapixels for the time. Second only to the high end Nokias, until Apple started to eat everyone's lunch.
The Trinitron TVs, monitors, WalkMans, and DiscMans were awesome. Then, they screwed the pooch in the mid 90's. Their support sucked and their products started sucking.
I have lots of hybrid SACDs and I cannot extract the high-res content for playback on computer/phone without my clunky Sony Blu-ray player. This is of course by design, but I do wonder if it also helped to kill the format before it even properly landed.
How would you have done this? USB wasn't around in the mid-90's, so you would have needed something that plugged into a serial port.
Would that have been that much worse than just running a 3mm cable from the MiniDisk headphone out to the computer's mic/line in? Or was Sony somehow preventing that?
I played around a lot with music trackers (production tool) during this time and often did the reverse so I could hear my productions on other stereos or in the car -- that is running computer output to a tape deck and recording to tape. This was obviously before CD burners were affordable.
> How would you have done this? USB wasn't around in the mid-90's, so you would have needed something that plugged into a serial port.
Probably the NetMD series which supported compressed storage onto “data” MDs.
While I never had a use for transferring off of MDs, the software used to manage MD contents was indeed one of the poorest I’ve ever had the misfortune to interact with. Even the worst eras of iTunes (which had generally been pretty shit especially on windows) does not come close to the utter dreck and absolute disaster that was SonicStage.
Was hoping someone would mention SonicStage. Sony forced you to use that awful software if you wanted to add music to your Walkman flash memory based MP3/4 players before they eventually gave up and let you just drag-and-drop as if it were a USB stick on newer models.
USB 1.0 was introduced in 1996, which is very much "mid 90s". Then again, it wasn't very popular and at 12Mbps for "full speed", it would not have been very fast.
I don't recall seeing USB (granted, this was my limited view as a teenager at the time) until the late 90's and I don't think I had a PC with USB until at least 2000 or 2001.
My girlfriend at the time started college in Fall 1999 and got a new laptop. She later got a CD burner and I remember it hooked up via serial port.
It definitely took a few years to see it become common. Mac may have been the first to really push it, but that would have been late-90's as well, post-Jobs' return.
It was the record companies and not Sony specifically. They had to play by the rules. You probably ended your relationship with Sony for plenty of reasons that came together in these changing times. Flat screens came along and you probably got out of gaming too. I have an uncle who once had everything Sony. But now, no. That TV is LG and his music setup is Apple.
Sony is (and already was back then) a record company. They were a huge chunk of the group making the rules, and were in a much better position than any other electronics company to fight them.
The Sony media tail was wagging the Sony hardware dog. That was the whole problem - they hamstrung their own products. End result was that they burned their own brand to the ground - there was a time when Sony hardware was cool.
What's really sad is that the entire reason Sony bought the media companies was to prevent them from interfering with new Sony hardware innovations. The record companies resisted the audio CD and the studios resisted Betamax. Sony seems to have forgotten this after Akio Morita stopped running things.
Well, it wasn't "the record companies" as a whole. The creative nomad player was during the same period and had no such limitations.
Sony, being a record company and a hardware company, limited their players in this way. And basically paved the way for other companies to take over the market.
Sad because their walk-man was basically the standard before, and sony makes some good hardware.
Huh, I just finished watching a youtube video on MiniDisc's rise and fall, with some twists along the way (featuring DAT, DCC, CD and eventually the iPod) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCK89V4NpJY
What I didn't know is that it has had a bit of a resurgence in a niche of retro enthusiasts, with limited indie hip-hop/waporwave/future funk releases as blank media continue to be made by Sony.
Somebodies probably trying to sell you something. I just got the same video on youtube. It's a very sublte form of marketing that plants ideas or breads knowledge before it's needed.
For example, remember all those articles that came out about the Max Headroom tv hack a few years ago? And then six months later Eminem is dressed as Max Headroom in his rap god video. An obscure cultural reference that you probably wouldn't get unless you were preconditioned.
So in six months time when a song or movie or product comes out and it's got mini disc references, you'll know.
Funny you mention DCC, I always though it to be superior over DAT as a DCC-player could operate audio cassette but I think their sales even dwarfed compared to DAT.
Sony's Entertainment Division probably had more to do with killing it than anything else. If the data drives were available with the music drives we probably would have seen some adoption given what was competing as external storage back then.
I agree, minidiscs were a RW media format with a 140MB capacity that popped up in a time where 1.44MB floppy disks where still extensively used and the next-day thing we're CDRs/CDRW, both of which made it prohibitively time-consuming to write anything at all and were relatively fragile and inconvenient.
I had a 25-pin parallel port version of Zip Drive. It worked great, but it was SLOOOOOOWWWWWWW. Burnable CDs were more practical not too long after & then I only used it on computers w/o a CD-ROM.
Ha, I never thought about digging on old articles on this topic.
- Sony announced the MiniDisc in September 1992
- Windows 3.1 ... by Microsoft ..., released on April 6, 1992
In windows 3.1 days floppies were the norm, jaz and zip were expensive and not so common.. minidiscs would have been so damn crazy cool as main storage format. So many alternative timelines..
I don't know about you, but in my area we started to see more MDs around the Sharp 722 days [0]. Later on Sony started to make them more afordable and featureful. That's quite a few years of void there.
Oh the nostalgia... I bought an 701 when it came out. I spent soo much time adding proper metadata to the music on my MDs, I feel like I could still use the device blindly because it is ingrained that deep into muscle memory although I haven't used it anymore since 22 years.
Magneto-Optical drives were also available at that time, and were designed for data storage. The problem was they were very expensive, and needed a SCSI interface at the time when personal computers mostly had IDE.
There really was no good solution to the interface problem until USB and SATA came along.
There was no good solution because there was no need for it. People weren't downloading, creating, or storing large amounts of data. Most of the stuff would fit on a floppy and you'd still have 90% of it empty. Any games would be on floppies you wouldn't dream of filling 10% your 420MB hard drive with 10 floppies at 1.44MB each.
Most people didn't even have a computer and those that did were not on the Internet. Even images were rare in the early days of the Web. Music was not a thing yet or at least not the ability to download it.
In 1996 I think the most files I had were either email or Corel Draw files (of nothing really just fun).
Your making a leap between “the time when everything was only on floppies” to “the time when everyone was doing multimedia online”, which ignores at least a decade of time starting in the mid 90s, and there absolutely was a huge need for it.
During that time, the main storage media was CDs, often used for software or mp3s. Games and other materials (like Encarta) were shipped on CDs because there was no Internet with lots of media, and anyone who did have it was on dialup. Shipping large data on CDs was the way it was done.
However CDs have the very obvious problem that they are not writable (CD writers were rare and very expensive for many years in the beginning), and once the writable ones came out they were still not suitable for things like random access read/write for typical documents, only really used more for archiving.
That’s why Zip drives were such a game changer (and the various other, now forgotten, attempts at solving this problem). Magneto-optical fall into this same time period.
> People weren't downloading, creating, or storing large amounts of data.
Yes, they were, which is why there were many attempts to solve the problem, despite no one solution winning.
> Most of the stuff would fit on a floppy and you'd still have 90% of it empty.
High-end, but not uncommon, displays were megapixel range truecolor displays. (Which makes how long we got stuck at FHD, which is 2MP, kind of sad). Uncompressed full screen images were significantly bigger than floppies.
> Any games would be on floppies you wouldn't dream of filling 10% your 420MB hard drive with 10 floppies at 1.44MB each.
Software distribution on floppies was quite compressed; you mightn’t fill your HD with one 10-floppy package (which is good, because the first 10+ floppy software package could be your OS), but it wouldn’t take many.
> Most people didn't even have a computer and those that did were not on the Internet.
The people that didn't have a computer really aren’t a factor in what was in demand by computer users. Those that weren't on the internet directly were often on BBS’s and online services like CompuServe, and were quite often downloading things.
Also, all that changed fairly rapidly over the time in question; in 1993 under a quarter of households had a computer, and internet penetration wasn’t even a thing people surveyed. In 1997 over a third had a computer, and about half of those households were on the internet. In 2001 over half had a computer, and about 80% of them were on the internet. [0]
> Music was not a thing yet or at least not the ability to download it.
Music downloading was definitely a thing by the mid-1990s, even if it didn't hit the public consciousness in a big way until Napster in 1999.
IIRC, 3.1 was available on both 3.5" and 5.25". And even that took a few years for 5.25 to vanish. Anything outside those two formats was in noman's land for what seemed like forever.
It's funny as I was growing up every few years there'd be tons of people ready to call it on the next betamax. It turns out ALL of it was. And it turns out that even owning a device that stores data at all is deprecated. Except for us devs (for now).
Spent my first money from designing Web sites on a Becker in-car MD player along with ~20 original MD releases. Added a 6-disc autochanger a year later. Class act.
ZIP was fairly successful until writable CDs came along. The biggest problem was the click of death. I remember collecting multiple drives in the late 1990’s trying to find one that didn’t have that issue.
I guess they could have done a more open standard, but I’m not sure it would have helped them. I recall Superdisk was a slightly more open standard around the same time (maybe a little later) and it went no where.
I loved my ZIP drive. At home, we had a flaky 56k6 connection. Since my dad worked at the university where he had a 100MBit connection, I would sometimes tag along with him, bring a stack of ZIP disks, and download a Linux distribution and a bunch of other new stuff.
I got a ZIP drive like a year before I got a CD burner so it didn't have a very long lifespan. I wish I still had it so I could hook it up and see what I put on the discs.
Still got a stack of Zip disks somewhere, full of Uni coursework and old design projects. The drive, in translucent plastic (to match the iMac), died long ago.
Back in the day, 100mb was a breathtakingly large amount of storage - more than 80 floppy disks!
Along with looking really cool, I think there were some other benefits as well.
Having a self contained case, and a pretty small size that can easily fit in your palm was pretty practical. We’d go on road trips and it was nice to be able to eject a cartridge and just put it on the dash or whatever.
Same as with a tape, making a recording was sort of time consuming because you couldn’t just drop files and burn to disk). Unlike a playlist that has infinite capacity, when recording to disk you had limited capacity so needed to make more careful editorial choices in your mix.
It was really nice giving or receiving a mix that a friend had taken the time to make :)
Yeah I don’t know why but holding a semi transparent little plastic package with the disk visible inside thats about the same size a my Samsung 2TB USB 3.2
Gen 2 SSD and even knowing that it only holds 140MB or so which is probably less than the SRAM cache on the SSD still feels like the future despite being nearly 30 years old at this point.
I think it's the fact that mindisc and CDs and other removable media had physical motion that some people find fascinating. As computers have become more powerful they've also become much less mechanical, at least at the human interaction scale. The physicality of human-computer interaction has almost been reduced to holding up a glass screen and either passively viewing or endlessly swiping, at least for many people.
I think Mini Disc's ultimate and final evolution - Playstation Portable's UMDs - has inherited that trait. Yes they are slow, they are fragile, but damn it was cool to have games ship on those tiny discs that actually worked in a portable console.
As Dogma1138 said, MiniDisc looks like the data format the future as imagined in 1970 would use. It could easily have appeared on UFO or 2001 or Star Wars or as late as Star Trek: TNG.
I don’t think these were ever used in a Star Trek show, maybe enterprise.
Sony’s memorystick flash storage did kinda look like the isolinear chips from TNG tho, back in the days where it was Sony or compact Flash/SmartMedia, the memorysticks also won on looks I swear I think that Sony was the only company that actually cared about how things looked in the 90’s and early 2000’s until Apple under Steve Jobs went through the whole look and feel first phase.
Yeah, but they don't match the aesthetics of a miniDisc. The small size, more "modern" design (fully transparent materials, more colorful, ...) just looks more futuristic.
Ironically it also helps that self-recorded MDs were the more common option, so the discs aren't covered in labels/printing. (I have one modern prerecorded MD release, and while the printing is neat in some ways, it doesn't have that futuristic side as much)
I remember using a caddy in one of the first CD-ROMs, in high school, no less, instructed in the care and, particularly, the -feeding- of the CD Drive by the kind librarian :)
I wish there were more posts about tape backup systems, and see some startup disrupt the market. Tape might seem slow to some people, but it's perfect for backup except the drives are too expensive right now.
Yeah, there is a sharp divide where you can get a LTO-3 drive like Ultrium 920 for as little as $40 used while LTO-5 (first to support LTFS) and newer quickly go into hundreds and thousands of dollars. I actually considered getting an older one but was concerned about continued availability of media.
You can get the media, but tape software for windows is a nightmare. Windows server 2019 doesn't support tape without hideously expensive 3rd party software or unuseable open source backup "solutions" that presume you have fifty boxes to manage.
Yes, that was my other concern, especially looking at long term storage - would I still find drivers for it (or the SCSI controllers) 10 years down the line. And even Linux has been purging unused/unmaintained drivers lately. As much as I liked the prospect of a little retro-computing side-project I ended up just burning a dozen BD-XL discs instead. Wouldn't really work for large volumes of data but this was just a personal backup.
I think the HP drives found in ML-350 servers and similar will likely be useable for a long time, but you seem to need the whole server, controller card combo. I have one of these servers but the tape drive is unused since some trial software i had expired. Not sure why it still costs thousands of dollars for tape backup software on a 10+ year old server.
Oddly, I just watched a rise and fall video yesterday (posted above somewhere already) on this that brought back memories.
My dad oddly noticed this and got us into mini discs with an entertainment system that had it, and then a small walkman player that I used to record songs and such onto it. It was so cool for me as an pre-teen. (My dad got into it in 1997ish)
I now want to just find a single MD to just keep as a memory, but they are costly to buy, even as a 5 pack.
Sony hamstrung Minidisc by enforcing separation between audio and data. While the audio MDs became widely available and pretty cheap, the data MDs were rare and expensive. It's largely the same reason standalone CD recorders failed in the market, while PC CD-R drives were wildly successful.
It was a fast and durable format. If they had come out the parallel-port or IDE based drives which wrote on the same audio MD blanks in the mid-90s, it could have displaced floppy disks and remained the standard until multi-gigabyte thumb drives came along.
I loved the idea of a high fidelity dropout free recording medium, hated the transfer process (analog). As a result, made a bunch of recordings and never did anything with them.
Got a little tascam pocket recorder when it came out. Loved the transfer process (usb). Still did nothing with the recordings. Turns out you have to be a really good musician to make a tolerable recording.
This about MiniDisc data discs, gosh I remember in 1996 I sold my Tascam 388 Reel-to-Reel 8 Track for a Tascam 564 4 Track minidisc. Terrible decision, although part of it was a reel to reel doesn't work great in a dorm room. 388 is a collector's item now, 564 is an anomaly.
MiniDisk could have been excellent and possibly even overtaken CDs in popularity. They were durable, had a small form factor, and were pretty cool looking. But then Sony decided to make it a proprietary audio format only and totally ruined the UX.
Mid 2000s I had one and loved it. Used it with a good mic to do the audio side of video recordings for art school projects. This combo produced very good quality audio compared to your average handheld camera.
I am doubt will blu-ray fall into the same problem.
Producers add a lot limits for copy-protect (HDCP and others on UHD-BD). But will the popularity/convenience of streaming repeat how USB stick/MP3 replace MiniDisc?
I think convenience and price are the largest factors. Netflix costs less than a Blu-Ray for 'all you can eat' and you do not have to think about logistics (find/purchase a disk).
Blu-rays do have copy protection, but AFAIK MakeMKV rips most Blu-rays without any issues.
GameCube used a mini DVD, but broke with the standard by using constant angular velocity instead of constant linear velocity. So the drive always spun at the same rpm, where regular DVDs spin slower the closer they read head is to the centre. This made them cheaper to make, and impossible to copy with a regular DVD burner.
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Due to the possibility that you might not have had license to record what you recorded, then you couldn't have a digital version of it on your computer.
This was the end of my relationship with Sony.