Christian HornSep 6, 2025
Tokyo's "Extinct Media Museum" is quite nice, brings up many memories (phun intended..)
Show threadJosh Sep 6, 2025

@globalc @Binder the first time I went to Tokyo (c. 1992), we went to the Sony offices, where they had an exhibition of storage media of the past, present, and (near) future. The future media included a variety of tape formats, including some absolutely tiny ones that were approaching SD card size. They were also heavily touting Minidisc, which was already being sold in Japan, but hadn’t yet reached tve US. (They also had HDTV CRTs!)

I really wish we’d gotten MP3 players that used tiny cassette tapes!

Show threadStarkRG
@josh0 @globalc @Binder There was DAT, which was smaller than the compact cassette, but still quite a bit larger than the minicassette. Minidiscs were absolutely fantastic, though, it's a real shame they didn't catch on much outside Japan. Sony's NT digital cassette was about the same size as a normal-sized SD card in two dimensions, probably about equal to a stack of three. It was marketed for taking memos, though, not for listening to music. And, again, didn't catch on.
Sep 7, 2025 at 9:26amWeb
Show threadJosh Sep 7, 2025
@StarkRG @globalc @Binder yes! The NT! That’s the one! I remember being very impressed by it at the time, even though it already seemed obvious that cassettes were on their way out. One friend of mine in California did end up getting a minidisc player, but the only way to use it for music was basically to record an album into it from his computer, so it really functioned more like a very limited MP3 player (which was still pretty nice in those pre-iPod days). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NT_(cassette)
NT (cassette) - Wikipedia

Show threadStarkRGSep 7, 2025
@josh0 @globalc @Binder Yeah, I think part of the reason Minidiscs got so popular in Japan, beyond just generally being awesome, was the existence of CD rentals in the same fashion as movie rentals (in fact, they were usually available at the same locations). Given how early MP3 players had relatively limited storage, a portable minidisc player with a small collection of discs was generally the better option. The Creative Nomad Jukebox might have been the only pre-iPod device with decent space.
Show threadStarkRGSep 7, 2025
@josh0 @globalc @Binder Oh, yeah, Wikipedia says the NT was introduced in 1992, that's early enough that it could have taken a sizable chunk of the market, had Sony pushed for that. Portable CD players were still kinda shit at that point and even in-car CD players were fairly rare and also still kinda shit (they hadn't really worked out how to do read-ahead anti-skip very well yet)
Show threadJosh Sep 7, 2025
@StarkRG @globalc @Binder I very clearly remember my first portable cd player. It was a Sony Discman, and I waited until such a thing was available for $100 (this was probably ‘96?). It was basically unusable for any use case beyond sitting still somewhere.
Show threadChristian HornSep 7, 2025
@StarkRG
The fact that copying mini-discs with consumer tech did automatically degrade the quality of what was stored digitally and could have been copied without loss.. this was always a "yes, that's capitalism" example for me.
@josh0 @Binder
Show threadJosh Sep 7, 2025
@globalc @StarkRG @Binder my friend’s mini disk player and PowerMac both supported TOSLINK, which helped a lot with the quality, but still.
Show threadJosh Sep 7, 2025
@globalc @StarkRG @Binder it appears that autocorrect cannot decide on a consistent way to spell ‘Minidisc’…
Show threadStarkRGSep 7, 2025
@josh0 @globalc @Binder Meanie Dysq
Show threadChristian HornSep 7, 2025
@josh0
Coming from Sony, it's of course meant to be spelled in Katakana :)
ミニディスク
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9F%E3%83%8B%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AF
@StarkRG @Binder
ミニディスク - Wikipedia

Show threadStarkRGSep 7, 2025
@globalc @josh0 @Binder Minidiscs used lossy compression, similar to MP3s, so I wouldn't go crediting capitalism for that. It was decent enough, though, better than the bitrate people often used for MP3s.
Show threadChristian HornSep 7, 2025
@StarkRG @josh0 @Binder
Hm.. ok.
Reading up a bit on it, lossy compression indeed.
Maybe it was a design decision somewhere in the hardware to have copies go through the encoder again instead of just writing down what was already coming from a minidisc.