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Ah, the eternally cool Mini-Disc, a trip down memory lane...
Sony could have made the Mini-Disc the replacement for the floppy. It was everything necessary and more:
- 140GB native capacity
- read-writable with no practical limits on the cycles
- incredibly tough and resilient design of the media itself in a damned near impossible to destroy in day to day use
- small portable size
and other aspects. The thing that killed them was they didn't pursue it as a floppy replacement even in spite of making that (insanely overpriced) Mini-Disc data drive mentioned above. I had the original Sony portable MD player/recorder back in 1993, even went so far as to purchase a few pre-recorded albums (Pearl Jam "Ten," Rush "Counterparts," and a few others) and loved the hell out of it in the time I owned it.
It's just another example of Sony creating some incredibly awesome technology then shooting themselves in the foot by doing something colossally stupid with it. For the MD it was a three-fold death knell:
First, they charged too much for that data drive as already mentioned. When it was first introduced in limited scope it was selling for like $1500 USD (no idea what was in Yen or whatever back in 1992-1993 times), and they chose not to miniaturize the MD data drive technology itself which was easy to do: if they could make that first portable MD player/recorder then using it strictly for a data drive would not have resulted in a device much larger but the MD data drive itself was freakin' monstrous in size overall. The price and the non-portability of the hardware necessary to use the Mini-Discs (themselves meant to be portable) was just a nightmare for Sony.
Second, they did tend to charge quite a bit for the consumer versions of their MD hardware as well, especially in 1993 - I paid $799 for that first Sony portable MD unit but amazingly the pre-recorded discs were about the same price as CDs at the time, roughly $14-18. It really angers me that today if I wanted to go out and buy the very first CD I ever owned - Dire Straits' magnificent work "Brothers In Arms" - I'd pay like $19 for it. When I bought the original CD in 1986 it was only $12.99 so, the hell with inflation. In those days it WAS expensive to manufacture CDs and jewel boxes because it was still relatively new technology and the fabrication plants were like a couple of billion to build themselves. But nowadays with the cheap efficiency to make such discs, charging people upwards of $20 for a CD that was originally released 30 years ago (geez, has it been that long? Ugh...) is just flat out ripping people off. Anyway...
Third, the consumer versions of the Mini-Disc hardware were strapped with the god awful SonicStage software that Sony just couldn't do right even if they had all the luck in the universe behind 'em. It was just horrible terrible disgusting stuff, really. If you could get it to run long enough before it crashed you might be able to transfer some content to your MDs, and as for recording things and then doing a digital copy of it, oh lord, you had to do a real-time analog copy process because of all nefarious DRM BS they claim they were forced to use because the recording industry didn't want people to rip 'em off by copying the discs like crazy.
And then Iomega came into the picture with the Zipdisk and that was that. Sony had the chance, it was right there for them to just reach out and grasp it and the floppy disk could have been relegated to the scrap heap of obsolete technology within a year or two but, no, they just didn't "get it" and so Iomega with their shitty disks and shitty hardware (but with a lot of space when it did work) just rolled right over the removable storage market like a proverbial Mack truck and that was that.
Having said that, the actual audio compression that Sony created for the MD< ATRAC, was damned good stuff. It could theoretically exceed CD quality and I never had a beef with that aspect of them.
Also: battery life. The original Sony portable I had could barely get through maybe 3 albums before it up and died on me regardless of whether they were fresh new ones in the battery pack or the rechargeable, didn't matter. Ran very warm too but, it was the first of its kind.
Contrast that with the last Sony Mini-Disc device I had, the all-too-awesome MZ-N1. It came with an internal "gum stick" battery because that's about how large it was: the size of a stick of something like typical chewing gum, about 1/8" thick. On a full charge I could easily get 35 hours of playback, seriously. Think about that for a moment:
The Mini-Disc is an electro-mechano-optical device: it has a spinning motor for the disc, it has other components that work in a mechanical fashion (the laser tracking assembly), and it has the laser itself which literally is pure energy for the most part. 35 freakin' hours from such a device in 2002 was damned amazing but it gets even better.
The MZ-N1 came with a small plastic battery extender that held one single AA battery. With the fully charged gum stick in place and then putting a fresh alkaline AA battery in the extender and screwing it on, how long would it play for continuously before dying?
105 hours.
No joke. I tested that claim because Sony put it in the marketing material and I consistently got 101-103 hours of raw playback - I put the Rush "Counterparts" MD in it, set it for random play/loop (so it would randomly just keep playing without intervention) and wham, it just wouldn't die for 4 damned days.
Astonishing, to say the least, and I never complained about the $400 price tag for it again.
I never got into the NetMD thing even though I thought the increased capacity could/would have been awesome. I wouldn't mind having another MD unit sometime just for shits and giggles. I see people putting up MD collections of hardware and pre-recorded discs on craigslist sometimes but they ask insanely high prices for the stuff. I want one again, sure, but I'm not forking over a handful of cash for it considering my smartphone these days is my audio device of choice more often than not.
Boy those were fun times, however.
ps
I hadn't visited the site in years but it's cool to see MiniDisc.org is still around and still the best source for MD info of all kinds, including a page devoted specifically the data drives that Sony created:
http://www.minidisc.org/md_data_table.html
Fascinating stuff, really. Note that Sony DID make a floppy drive (not disk, I mean the physical drive) that would fit in the spot where a traditional floppy disk drive did:
but the pricing was just too much as expected and they chose to couple it with a SCSI interface instead of IDE for some stupid reason. I would have LOVED to have had one of those, would probably have a gigantic collection of MDs. I mean, if Neo from "The Matrix" used Mini-Discs, why the hell not?