5 ms·

What has always fascinated me about old hardware/software is the "what if" aspect. Up until mid-90s, there was a real diversity of ideas and architectures in c

What has always fascinated me about old hardware/software is the "what if" aspect. Up until mid-90s, there was a real diversity of ideas and architectures in computing. 68K, PPC, x86, RISC, ARM, MIPS, i860, and I'm forgetting a lot of others. There were a lot of interesting ideas, some of which did become standard, while others died either for technical reasons (lack of adequate 3D capability on the Amiga) or because of business deals that didn't pan out (such as BeOS on Macintosh being dumped in favor of buying out NeXT). Of course x86 seems standard and humdrum today, but it wasn't necessarily meant to be that way. We could have been running BeOS on i860-based hardware, with MiniDiscs for removable storage, if things had panned out differently. And I find that fascinating to consider, when examining old computers.

mrweasel 5y ago
> with MiniDiscs for removable storage I wonder why that never amounted to anything. If I recall a few drives was made, but the cost just meant they where out of reach. The disc was just so cool, like take out of a sci-fi.
- cogman10 5y ago
  They were pretty popular in the EU circa 2004ish. A lot of people used them for MP3 storage. I think what killed them was ultimately the iPod.
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    Also around that era a usb drive of comparable size was available and pretty much worked with all computers for similar price points.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    I actually have one family member that uses mini-discs. Mostly to listen to older stuff that she only have on mini-disc, but that's also an indication of how durable those things are. Getting new mini-discs plays is however getting extremely difficult, and expensive.
  - KozmoNau7 5y ago
    Minidiscs for music were very popular before MP3 players had reasonable storage space, at least here in Denmark and AFAIK in most of Europe, and obviously in Japan. If you had to pick between an MP3 player with 32MB or maybe 64MB of fixed internal memory, or a Minidisc player where each disc could hold a full CD album and you could swap them as easily as a CD or a floppy disk, the choice was pretty clear, especially when you looked at it as a logical progression from a discman. The ATRAC codec is a mostly-OK lossy codec. Not full CD quality, but it was comparable to MP3 at the time. (Minidiscs never supported MP3 until right at the end of Hi-MD, otherwise they were ATRAC and eventually CD-quality PCM only.) The final iteration (Hi-MD) could hold 1GB of data or 94 minutes of full CD-quality uncompressed PCM audio, but that was too little and too late when it came out in 2004. As for using Minidisc for data, that was a slightly different kettle of fish. The format was absolutely capable of doing it and the original discs could hold 140MB (increasing with later format revisions), which would have been absolutely groundbreaking in the early 90s. All of the technology was mature and proven and fully capable of displacing both the floppy disc and the CD. This was before the Zip disk, with higher storage capacity and actually reliable. The magneto-optical Minidisc could theoretically be rewritten millions of times, and sure each disc was a bit expensive initially, but they were super durable with a tough plastic shell, and 140MB of storage was more than a lot of people's home computers had at the time. Unfortunately the record label arm of Sony were terrified of organized illegal copying and distribution, and because everyone was generally stuck in a mindset of seeing Minidisc as a cassette tape replacement rather than a general data storage format, it was stuck with real-time dubbing only (some devices with integrated CD and MD players offered high-speed dubbing, but it was still just dubbing, not data transfer). It didn't get data storage capability until the Hi-MD in 2004, which again was too little too late. Combined with Sony's general insistence on keeping their formats proprietary and locked down (see Memory Stick, UMD, Betamax, DAT and so on), everything just conspired to not let the technical capabilities of Minidisc come to fruition. There was an MD Data format, but it never really got off the ground. It used special incompatible MD Data discs, which were rare and expensive, plus the drives themselves were big, clunky and expensive. Minidisc was legitimately a big hit for a while, for portable music. But it never quite displaced the CD and it never became the data storage format it could have been. And now we've got cheap flash memory, so even the idea of a magneto-optical disc seems a bit quaint and antiquated.
bombcar 5y ago
Even further back and you find that so many things we take for granted were just one of many options. Things I can think of offhand: 1. 8-bit bytes (7,6,9 were common) 2. Byte-level addressing (word addressing was common) 3. One's complement

mrweasel 5y ago

> with MiniDiscs for removable storage I wonder why that never amounted to anything. If I recall a few drives was made, but the cost just meant they where out of reach. The disc was just so cool, like take out of a sci-fi.

cogman10 5y ago
They were pretty popular in the EU circa 2004ish. A lot of people used them for MP3 storage. I think what killed them was ultimately the iPod.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Also around that era a usb drive of comparable size was available and pretty much worked with all computers for similar price points.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I actually have one family member that uses mini-discs. Mostly to listen to older stuff that she only have on mini-disc, but that's also an indication of how durable those things are. Getting new mini-discs plays is however getting extremely difficult, and expensive.
- KozmoNau7 5y ago
  Minidiscs for music were very popular before MP3 players had reasonable storage space, at least here in Denmark and AFAIK in most of Europe, and obviously in Japan. If you had to pick between an MP3 player with 32MB or maybe 64MB of fixed internal memory, or a Minidisc player where each disc could hold a full CD album and you could swap them as easily as a CD or a floppy disk, the choice was pretty clear, especially when you looked at it as a logical progression from a discman. The ATRAC codec is a mostly-OK lossy codec. Not full CD quality, but it was comparable to MP3 at the time. (Minidiscs never supported MP3 until right at the end of Hi-MD, otherwise they were ATRAC and eventually CD-quality PCM only.) The final iteration (Hi-MD) could hold 1GB of data or 94 minutes of full CD-quality uncompressed PCM audio, but that was too little and too late when it came out in 2004. As for using Minidisc for data, that was a slightly different kettle of fish. The format was absolutely capable of doing it and the original discs could hold 140MB (increasing with later format revisions), which would have been absolutely groundbreaking in the early 90s. All of the technology was mature and proven and fully capable of displacing both the floppy disc and the CD. This was before the Zip disk, with higher storage capacity and actually reliable. The magneto-optical Minidisc could theoretically be rewritten millions of times, and sure each disc was a bit expensive initially, but they were super durable with a tough plastic shell, and 140MB of storage was more than a lot of people's home computers had at the time. Unfortunately the record label arm of Sony were terrified of organized illegal copying and distribution, and because everyone was generally stuck in a mindset of seeing Minidisc as a cassette tape replacement rather than a general data storage format, it was stuck with real-time dubbing only (some devices with integrated CD and MD players offered high-speed dubbing, but it was still just dubbing, not data transfer). It didn't get data storage capability until the Hi-MD in 2004, which again was too little too late. Combined with Sony's general insistence on keeping their formats proprietary and locked down (see Memory Stick, UMD, Betamax, DAT and so on), everything just conspired to not let the technical capabilities of Minidisc come to fruition. There was an MD Data format, but it never really got off the ground. It used special incompatible MD Data discs, which were rare and expensive, plus the drives themselves were big, clunky and expensive. Minidisc was legitimately a big hit for a while, for portable music. But it never quite displaced the CD and it never became the data storage format it could have been. And now we've got cheap flash memory, so even the idea of a magneto-optical disc seems a bit quaint and antiquated.

bombcar 5y ago

Even further back and you find that so many things we take for granted were just one of many options. Things I can think of offhand: 1. 8-bit bytes (7,6,9 were common) 2. Byte-level addressing (word addressing was common) 3. One's complement