this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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I legit have been considering buying a minidisc player, just for the sheer cool factor of them. Sometimes truly special form is lost as function evolves.
minidiscs should have been the standard CDs became. no one would have considered holding a 3.5" floppy disc gingerly by the edges and placing it into a tray to read. the case is critical.
however, the industry realized people were replacing their scratched cd's, so they'd sell 2, 3 of the same disc to the same person. Source: worked at a record store in the hight of the CD age when mini discs were all but essentially snuffed out
I mean, maybe not the mini disk specifically, but yah, a cartridge system for CDs would have been better.
Mini disks are super cool but they’re a lot more materially demanding than a CD, CDs being just aluminum and plastic, where as a minidisc has some truly wacky elements in it’s make up to get the magneto optical and curie point to work.
I mean you clearly know way more about it than me.. but yeah some kind of carrier/cartridge protecting the disc and we'd probably still be using CD-W-RW's
The mini disk was a truly weird system. Half way between a cassette and a CD. CD used a laser to to reflect off bumps(or dyes in some varieties) on the disk to get a signal, and a cassette would use a metal head to detect magnetization along the tape to get a signal.
The mini disk used a laser to read the magnetization around the disk. Essentially the magnetism would change the polarity of the light as it bounced off, and by measuring what the polarity of the reflected light is, the device got the signal.
Writing to the disk was also wild, as unlike the cassette, the magnetic field of the disk couldn’t just be changed by putting it next to a strong magnet like. Instead, it had to be heated up before the magnetism could be changed, this heating was done with the laser, and was very precise compared to a cassette’s method. This meaning way more information could be squeezed on to the disk than on a cassette.
no shit.. thats wild, really. heh. I always presumed it was an optical disk in a little case
There were several attempts to chain CDs to caddys, kind of like Laser Disc none stuck.
There were also Zip (250MB) and Jazz (1GB) Drives that were pretty amazing for their day. Unfortunately media was expensive. Jazz was pretty great for backups though.
money! just production costs I'd say. I took a 3D design class forever ago and they made us get Zip disks, and if you wanted to work on stuff at home that meant you needed a zip drive. My dad (RIP) bought me a drive and I'm somehow still touched as it was a reasonably big purchase at the time for a slacker 18 year old doing 3D design at a community college
Not a 3D designer now, finally went back to college for something else in my 20s.. anyway, rip my dad and rip the zip drive, they were cool. 100mb wow