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Comment by stinos | Hacker News Reader

I had exactly the same with Minidisc. Go through discs with labels I made myself, select one, 'click' opens the player, 'click' insert the disc and close, then the device comes to life in your hand and you press a hardware play button (of which muslce memory knows the location by heart so always just works), music comes out of the headphones, so fullfilling.

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It was a shame Sony never produced a consumer grade minidisc writer for PCs. I always wanted to be as cool as Neo in the original Matrix, sharing warez on minidiscs.

They did. It came out too late and was too expensive for what you got compared to a Zip drive (an extra 40MB and smaller size for like an extra $500). They were also weirdly limited in that MD-DATA drives could only play regular MDs, not record music onto them.

They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but I don't believe those could handle data, just music.

yeah, that's the story of MD in general. Sony the record company was terrified of the implications of bit-perfect digital copies with no generational loss, so they made sony the electronics division gimp it in tons of random ways and made the user experience confusing and awful, and then got their lunch eaten by CDs/ripping (lossless and otherwise) and itunes anyway. DVDs and HDDs won for storage and the ipod and then iphone won for portability/convenience.

It's also always struck me as one of those products that was primarily made for the japanese market and they didn't really care as much about the rest of the world, it was a walkman 2.0 thing for japan since they fucking love walkman.

That's the story of Sony in general. They had great tech but their content division always forced the consumer electronics division to gimp that tech in random ways, which led to the tech failing on the market.

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