3 ms·

And it could have been the successor to the floppy

masklinn 11mo ago
There were already plenty of “successors to the floppy” in the dustbin of history (floptical, Iomega zip, LS120, …). None of them was competitive as a distribution format, or at all once CD-R became widely available.
- esseph 11mo ago
  I was in college during the time, but I remember all of these digital art students had iMacs and these clear+blue FireWire zip drives they used to carry around between classes and home.
- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  Yeah, and the MiniDisc was the only one that could have come close. Sony already had computer MiniDisc readers/writers, mass production with pre-recorded content, (fairly) large volumes. They just never connected these things to each other. It could have been a great standard and we would have been plagued to this day with them. :) In some ways it's even better than USB flash. There are no read-only flash drives, for instance. It's also a problem that you mosh "data" in the same port you mosh "keyboard" or "spy device". We gained a lot with the USB paradigm but we lost some things, too.
  - xtiansimon 11mo ago
    MiniDisk! I loved that format. Great physical size. I suspect my love is all about nostalgia for the future, because when they came out they were foreign (at least in the US) and fly.
- tastyfreeze 11mo ago
  After using minidisk I was sure that LS120 would succeed. The formats of cartridged optical disks mostly removed the annoyance of scratched disks. Now the only place I see optical disks in a cartridge is at the library where they put some CDs in a cartridge to use in a special drive.
ofrzeta 11mo ago
You mean like the Zip drive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  In principle, maybe, but Zip disks were errorprone, didn't store music for portable players, and were rather large and cumbersome. Minidiscs were even smaller than floppies and more robust.

There were already plenty of “successors to the floppy” in the dustbin of history (floptical, Iomega zip, LS120, …). None of them was competitive as a distribution format, or at all once CD-R became widely available.

esseph 11mo ago
I was in college during the time, but I remember all of these digital art students had iMacs and these clear+blue FireWire zip drives they used to carry around between classes and home.
actionfromafar 11mo ago
Yeah, and the MiniDisc was the only one that could have come close. Sony already had computer MiniDisc readers/writers, mass production with pre-recorded content, (fairly) large volumes. They just never connected these things to each other. It could have been a great standard and we would have been plagued to this day with them. :) In some ways it's even better than USB flash. There are no read-only flash drives, for instance. It's also a problem that you mosh "data" in the same port you mosh "keyboard" or "spy device". We gained a lot with the USB paradigm but we lost some things, too.
- xtiansimon 11mo ago
  MiniDisk! I loved that format. Great physical size. I suspect my love is all about nostalgia for the future, because when they came out they were foreign (at least in the US) and fly.
tastyfreeze 11mo ago
After using minidisk I was sure that LS120 would succeed. The formats of cartridged optical disks mostly removed the annoyance of scratched disks. Now the only place I see optical disks in a cartridge is at the library where they put some CDs in a cartridge to use in a special drive.

ofrzeta 11mo ago

You mean like the Zip drive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

actionfromafar 11mo ago
In principle, maybe, but Zip disks were errorprone, didn't store music for portable players, and were rather large and cumbersome. Minidiscs were even smaller than floppies and more robust.