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 threadStarkRGSep 7, 2025
@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.
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 threadChristian Horn
@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

Sep 7, 2025 at 10:00amWeb