Okay, so I somehow missed the whole minidisc era. I imagine probably because it was shortlived, or just impractical for me at the time. However I find them incredibly fascinating, especially portable minidisc players. I’ve low key been on the lookout for one while thrifting, so I have an excuse to dive in.
they were super-cool, and, yeah, it was very short-lived. i had a net-MD player, a small, portable MD player that ran on a single AA battery and lasted ages. it could also record on-device and also played mp3s. i loved that fucking thing!
MDs were better than CD-RWs because they were 1/2 the size and came in a case while being almost skip-proof.
My mini disc cost as much as the first iPod when it came out. It was either 3 or 5 of the discs equaled it’s storage and I think it even took rechargeable AA batteries. Or at least had an attachment that would work with them.
And it has the remote in the cord that gave song title and playlist info.
It was better in everyway. But the promise of “new” and the marketing made everyone go iPod. I never met a single other person at the time that had a mini disc.
But being able to just swap a disc with someone at school and then upload it back to your computer at home would have been huge at the time.
Literal peer to peer file sharing without the internet. And it might have been normalized for an entire generation if Steve Jobs wasn’t so good at marketing.
oh, i remember those. they were like a super-Zip disk right in the era when usb flash drives and early sd cards and CD-Rs and -RWs were just becoming a thing.
i remember they never took off because nobody could quite figure out what to use them for since there were several other overlapping storage media that were emergent at the time which were better suited to their needs (and cheaper).
Worked in radio for a number of years, and we used mini disks to record phone calls for a while. Still have a number of them knocking around a storage box somewhere.
miniDisc FTW
Okay, so I somehow missed the whole minidisc era. I imagine probably because it was shortlived, or just impractical for me at the time. However I find them incredibly fascinating, especially portable minidisc players. I’ve low key been on the lookout for one while thrifting, so I have an excuse to dive in.
they were super-cool, and, yeah, it was very short-lived. i had a net-MD player, a small, portable MD player that ran on a single AA battery and lasted ages. it could also record on-device and also played mp3s. i loved that fucking thing!
MDs were better than CD-RWs because they were 1/2 the size and came in a case while being almost skip-proof.
For sure.
My mini disc cost as much as the first iPod when it came out. It was either 3 or 5 of the discs equaled it’s storage and I think it even took rechargeable AA batteries. Or at least had an attachment that would work with them.
And it has the remote in the cord that gave song title and playlist info.
It was better in everyway. But the promise of “new” and the marketing made everyone go iPod. I never met a single other person at the time that had a mini disc.
But being able to just swap a disc with someone at school and then upload it back to your computer at home would have been huge at the time.
Literal peer to peer file sharing without the internet. And it might have been normalized for an entire generation if Steve Jobs wasn’t so good at marketing.
I did not have any miniDiscs but I did have a SuperDisk in a PC I built which was a complete waste of time and money.
The SuperDisk was a waste. Not my whole PC.
oh, i remember those. they were like a super-Zip disk right in the era when usb flash drives and early sd cards and CD-Rs and -RWs were just becoming a thing.
i remember they never took off because nobody could quite figure out what to use them for since there were several other overlapping storage media that were emergent at the time which were better suited to their needs (and cheaper).
Seemed like a good idea when I built my PC.
Was not a good idea. Big waste of time and money.
If you still have any minidiscs around, glue a couple magnets on the back and they make a great retro fridge magnet.
Worked in radio for a number of years, and we used mini disks to record phone calls for a while. Still have a number of them knocking around a storage box somewhere.