From the January 1996 issue of PC World:
Sony has great hopes for its MiniDisc Data format as the next-generation mass storage media. And why not? On the surface, it has a lot going for it. A blank 2.5-inch magneto-optical MiniDisc offers 140MB of rewritable storage, and Sony promises the discs can be rewritten more than a million times with no loss of data integrity.
MD Data was emblematic for the MiniDisc format as a whole. Great technology, but far too expensive for most people, and always outdone by emerging competing formats (CD-R, MP3 players). Still, I used MiniDisc all the way through high school and university, well into the smartphone era, and I will always consider it my favourite music format.
Like most Sony products, it was somehow both way ahead of it’s time, and somehow a product OF it’s time. Magneto-optical disks were hailed for a long time as the floppy disk of the future, and many formats made it to market. It was just that they were quite expensive and capacities were outshone by emerging formats like DVD and the USB stick. It’s quite nice that MiniDisc was at least a pretty successful magneto-optical format.
And to dig on the BetaMax just does it a disservice. The BetaMax was a good format, plagued by some short-sighted decisions that took too long (or were impossible) to remedy. The biggest problem for Beta was it’s smaller cassette (compared to VHS and Video2000) which greatly limited playback time, as there just wasn’t room to fit more tape in. Despite these issues, Beta was still very much a viable format from a performance point of view. Price, like with the Minidisc, also played a part in it’s downfall too.
Indeed, equipped myself with MO technology (3.5″ from Fujitsu, from 128MB to 1.3GB) but yeah, pretty expensive yet more reliable than CD/DVD of that era. Matter of choice.
However USB2 then USB3 2.5″ external hard drives and flash storage completely killed the game. Large capacity, incredible speed. MO couldn’t compete on that ground but long time longevity. Provided MO readers still exist later in time (ie. mine are SCSI, who still use SCSI nowadays?).
You’d be surprised SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is still very much relevant in high-end and enterprise machines.
SCSI, like RS232, VGA, and to a lesser extent, parallel, are some of those technologies you’d have thought would have been killed off decades ago, but are still widely in use today.
Even outside of computing, Morse code is still as relevant today as it was 50 years ago. People still buy music on a format nearly a century old (vinyl records), and pour flammable liquids into a tin box to get from A to B.
COBOL isn’t dead. Forth is still being coded. Industrial plants still need technicians familiar with PDP-11’s and 8086 PCs.
People seem to have this delusion that old technology is bad and magically disappears after something better supersedes it. In reality, life is more like this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/927/
Still, buying SCSI-2 hardware become less and less easy.
Blu-ray was the next Betamax. I’d change the subject line to “Is Sony’s 140MB MiniDisc drive the next Blu-ray?”
Or maybe just say “Sony blows it again.” (maybe make it an eternal thread)
Blu-Ray was successful though. It was HD-DVD that completely flopped.
“Blu-Ray was successful though.”
That’s an overstatement.
The movie-industrie settled on the more expensive HD-standard and had to lower their prices to dvd-levels because consumers didn’t pay more for HD.
And 3D and 4k were dead on arrival.
The main problem, at least on PC, was to have the complete chain validated with HDCP.
I do have a PC with Blu-Ray drive, but neither valid software to play them, nor valid screen to watch them.
@The123king every PC had a DVD drive. I haven’t seen a single real life PC with a blu-ray drive. If you want to watch a movie or series your first choice will be a streaming service. I only see people on youtube watch blu-rays and none of the people I know have ever watched a single blu-ray.
Seems to me blu-ray is for movie fanatics and console gamers.
Blu-Ray on a computer was going to be a marketing challenge but Sony made a number of actions that probably slowed uptake. The Blu-Ray drive was (and still is) much more expensive than a DVD drive. Blank BD-R were initially sold singly at $15 each while a sale would provide a 100 pack of DVD-R for the same price. Nothing like how DVD drives rapidly dropped to similar prices to CD drives and DVD playback software was cheap and easy to get.
To me going from CD tot DVD was great on the PC. But when DVDs became too small I found harddrives to be a better way of storing backups than Blu-ray.
From what I can see:
blu-ray burner: E81
25GB blu-ray: E5.33
So 4TB: 4000GB/25GB=160xE5.33=E853+E81=E934
0.23/GB
4TB harddisk: E105
So 4TB: 0.026/GB
Blu-ray needs to be at most 65 cents so it can compete on price/GB
i think the reason Blu-Ray hasn’t been more successful has been due to the proliferation of streaming more thaan the fact that demand for HD/4K content has gone away. The fact is, you don’t need to buy a disk to watch high definition films.
That doesn’t mean it’s a failed format. It’s still widely sold and many people own Blu-Ray players and have a Blu-Ray film collection. It’s just much more niche nowadays, because people no longer feel the need to buy content on a physical disk nowadays. The same happened 10 years ago with the CD and iTunes.