5 ms·
The minidisc is the most “aesthetic” format ever made they simply looked cool, and today the have a retro futuristic look. Flash drives and portable NVME SSDs
by dogma1138 5y ago
The minidisc is the most “aesthetic” format ever made they simply looked cool, and today the have a retro futuristic look.
Flash drives and portable NVME SSDs are awesome but they just look boring.
The Zip Drive also never looked as cool both the drives and the disks looked rather boring compared to the minidisc.
- Arubis 5y agoAgreed; the minidisc nails the neotokyo vibe for me.
- xupybd 5y agoAbsolutely, if I could buy a reasonably priced MD player I would use that as my primary music source. I love the look. It's probably thanks to the matrix and the format being out of my reach as a teenager but oh so cool
- dogma1138 5y agoYeah 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.
- xupybd 5y agoYeah I'd love it if someone made fake MiniDiscs out modern storage. Just having a cartridge would be awesome
- reassembled 5y agoI 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.
- Bluestein 5y ago> The minidisc is the most “aesthetic” format ever made ... you are on to something here. (I mean, look at how many movies it shows up in :)
- TMWNN 5y agoAs 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.
- Bluestein 5y ago> Star Trek: TNG I am convinced, if one looks hard enough a MiniDisc -has- to be found in some TNG episode :)
- dogma1138 5y agoI 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.
- Bluestein 5y ago> maybe enterprise. Good call. That'd fit better with the "timeline", in that retro-futuristic way :)
- gambiting 5y agoI 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.
- the8472 5y agoCaddies aren't unique to minidiscs though, CD caddies were a thing too for example. Or do you mean the portable players? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)#/media/File:Cd_caddies_JPG.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)#/media/File:C...
- detaro 5y agoYeah, 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)
- Bluestein 5y ago> t also helps that self-recorded MDs were the more common option, so the discs aren't covered in labels/printing. I hadn't thought of it, but you are right. (Then again cassettes were also mostly always used "naked" - as in, copied and devoid of labeling ... ... and they never reached MD-level cool :) ... though they might have seem like a very futuristic thing when first introduced.)
- Bluestein 5y agoI 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 :)
- mathewsanders 5y agoAlong 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 :)
- fomine3 5y agoI wish DVD-RAM with cartridge also took off. It seems that was it only a thing in Japan?
- amyjess 5y agoI could also say much the same about Magneto-Optical and Syquest disks. That aesthetic is just cool. (though I'd say that flash drives can be cool if you treat them as James Bond spy gear and get drives disguised as everyday objects or jewelry)
- Grustaf 5y agoSurely vinyl is the most aesthetic format! But I grant that MiniDisc is the prettiest and coolest portable format ever.