chanju
Obsolete SonyStill looks like it's from the future.
Juliet (Ryel), Rollerskating Elf 🏳️‍⚧️I want to bite it.
My MDs back in high school absolutely had teeth marks on them.
@obsoletesony
R.L. Dane 
🍵 
Kinda sad we never got a true replacement for/upgrade to the floppy disk.
I mean, there were LOTS of them, but no one true replacement.
In the 2000s, I was hoping that manufacturers would come together and create a standard form factor of usb thumb drive, so we could have actual usb thumb drive drives on our machines to pop thumb drives into and out of, but that never happened.
Of course, SD Cards and SD Micro cards fit the bill very nicely, but they never became general-purpose data storage devices, except for embedded applications like raspberry Pis (and of course, cameras and such).
Not with Stupid; I AM Stupid.@rl_dane @obsoletesony One of the places I worked at used a Sony Mavica floppy disk camera for collecting pictorial evidence of damage caused to the comany's infrastructure by outside parties. This camera used a MMC card adaptor in the shape of of a floppy disk for recording more photos than would fit on a floppy. To import the photos the card was extracted and placed into a card reader. The MMC format was the same shape as the SD card but much thinner as it lacked the locking feature of the SD card.
Ah, I remember MMC cards! I don't recall if I ever used one myself, but they were popular in the earlyish "naughties."
And I do recall that funky mavica with the floppy->MMC adapter. ;)
@rl_dane @obsoletesony At one stage they were clearing out the office and I wound up with that Mavica camera. It’s technically still workable but the backlighting for the digital viewfinder has failed. It was an interesting mix of technologh, limited recording to floppy disks but having 10x optical zoom.
I miss optical zoom. XD
@rl_dane @obsoletesony I also have an Olympus 4.0 MP digital camera from 2003 that features 4 x digital zoom, 10 x optical zoom and has a clever upscaling mode that allows it to capture 7MP images. Works fine to this day.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)@rl_dane @obsoletesony MiniDisc absolutely could have been this, but Sony was a record label as well as a tech company and killed MD-Data as a consumer product because it might lead to music piracy. The fact that they’d have made vastly more controlling the de-facto standard removable media format than they would have lost from consumers copying the occasional album demonstrates that capitalists are not always good at capitalism. They did the same thing with at least one flash storage standard.
DJDarren@david_chisnall @rl_dane @obsoletesony The original PSP discs were essentially just Hi-MD, weren't they?
@DJDarren @rl_dane @obsoletesony I believe so. Sony was happy to put MD in places that were not general-purpose computers, they just didn’t want to have them in things where people would be able to strip copy protection and pirate music. And putting them in the PSP increased the incentive: you can!t copy PSP games if they don’t sell affordable MD-Data writers.
As I recall, the format topped out at 1 GB. That’s big enough for the vast majority of things I want to move between computers. Not big enough for backups (even BluRay isn’t these days, optical disks never quite kept up with hard disks for capacity).
Flamekebab@Flamekebab @DJDarren @rl_dane @obsoletesony Oh, nice. I suspect it would have scaled more if it had been funded by the revenue from selling a load of drives.
Idiot Complete Disaster@david_chisnall @Flamekebab @DJDarren @rl_dane @obsoletesony
This thread makes me so sad. Minidiscs are _so cool_, and I too lament the lack of true floppy replacement.
DVD-RAM also could have helped fill this void (and the void of no good VHS replacement!!!) But alas that future never happened, either :(
@OpenComputeDesign @david_chisnall @Flamekebab @DJDarren @obsoletesony
Ah, yes, DVD-RAM had it's brief day in the sun with early 2010s optical DVRs. Those were pretty cool. :D
Man, almost all of the scifi I saw growing up had some kind of optical media in the distant future.
I want to touch my data again, and a thumb drive doesn't quite cut it.
Part of the problem is that removable storage has become so voluminous, it's just a bit of the cloud in your pocket (tons of random data), rather than a conscious thought of, "Here are my Paris pictures," or "here is my awesome EDM/Worship mix."
@rl_dane @david_chisnall @Flamekebab @DJDarren @obsoletesony
Micro-SD cards especially are gawd-awful. "Oh yeah, here's a little square with more storage than my hard drive, yet it's so small, if I sneeze, it will be lost to the sands of time forever"
Compact Flash is the smallest any storage media has any legal right to be.
@OpenComputeDesign @david_chisnall @Flamekebab @DJDarren @obsoletesony
I think regular SD is a nice size.
@rl_dane @david_chisnall @Flamekebab @DJDarren @obsoletesony Still too small. It should be big and heavy enough to hurt if one gets thrown at you, otherwise it's too light to feel if you've dropped it or not
@OpenComputeDesign @rl_dane @Flamekebab @DJDarren @obsoletesony They’re a good size for replaceable storage, where you mostly keep it in the device and occasionally remove it to install a new one. They’re a terrible size for removable storage, where you keep it outside of the device for more than a few minutes and lose it.
\ ...demonstrates that capitalists are not always good at capitalism.
Glorious understatement. XD
I don't mean to razz you or anything, the wording of it just tickled me. ^__^
Ben@obsoletesony man I had one of those Sony players and it was sick as hell
Alakest@obsoletesony I can squint my eyes and see Keanu Reeves wearing a ska suit and tie and some clunky eighties VR gear talking some Gibson-esque cyber-jargon about the street finding it's own used for things.
With one of these in his free hand as he makes inscrutable VR gestures in mid air with the other gloved hand.
CaptainAyeAye@obsoletesony ah, I miss my old mini-discs. It was such an interesting format. Killed by Sony's imposed limitations and the advent of HDD/SD based players.
Tapas Easwar@obsoletesony The history of this format is deeply fascinating:
Sony MiniDisc: The (Not) Forgotten Audio Format That (Never) Failed
Briala@obsoletesony It's easy to overlook the fact that Sony created an affordable consumer MO disk format that was more successful than any other. Just a shame the silo-ization inside Sony meant it was never the contender for replacing the ubiquitous floppy disk that it should have been.
Jo the Neenish Tart@static @obsoletesony I still have my MiniDisc recorder. Makes me so nostalgic for the early 2000s
@neenish_tart @obsoletesony I have both portable recorders I bought over the years. Dad used to have a deck, but it died.
MD was very nearly the perfect audio format: most of the best parts of CD and most of the best bits of cassette.
@static @obsoletesony Also how cool was the video for Freestyler by Bomfunk MCs
@neenish_tart @obsoletesony And they had a small appearance in The Matrix as data discs. Oh what could've been...
Claude@static In Last Action Hero, it's what Jack Slater uses to listen to music in his car. And in Strange Days, MDs are the physical format used for recording people's memories. @neenish_tart @obsoletesony
Stefan Ihringer@obsoletesony Yep. This animated masterpiece basically starts out with one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n_Ae9DGC0U
Starship Velociraptor
Fleur Vervenne@obsoletesony i recall these were sold as the future....
Toxo77@obsoletesony
Instant "Strange days" vibes !
Instant "Strange days" vibes !
deBaer@obsoletesony After the great resurgences of vinyl records and cassette tape, I expect MD to be the leading format for physical audio no later than 2040.
Mex@obsoletesony Could have been the future if Sony hadn't been so Sony about the format
kieliscalling@obsoletesony I loved them
@obsoletesony it's my primary way of consuming recorded music these days.
Arthur Dent
Emery@obsoletesony I want to see this come back as storage with fancy new magneto-optical disc tech that can store terabytes
forbin42@obsoletesony I miss my MD
Meercat ✅ 
nocci [cyberpunk'd]